FOR NEARLY NINETY YEARS, THE STRAND HAS BEEN A New York institution, a mecca for readers across the five boroughs and beyond. It began in 1927, when Benjamin Bass, a devoted reader and lover of the arts, opened a small secondhand bookstore on Book Row, the stretch of Fourth Avenue between Fourteenth Street and Astor Place then known for its density of bookshops. Bass put up $300 of his own money, borrowed another $300 from a friend, and opened the Strand Book Store, named for the street in London. With Bass’s shrewd business sense and deep knowledge of books, the Strand soon attracted a following, and even as most stores on Book Row had closed, the store thrived. In 1956, Bass moved the store to bigger digs around the corner, at the corner of Broadway and Twelfth Street, where it stands today as Book Row’s sole survivor.
Over the years, floors were added, sections and shelves were expanded, order was brought from the chaos. (Perhaps the only physical detail that remains untouched is a ground-floor column that stands as a memento to the past.) The store is still run by the Bass family: Bass’s son Fred joined the fold, and in turn so, too, did Fred’s daughter Nancy. Even as the store has grown—weathering the rise of big chain bookstores and then the Internet—the Strand’s identity has remained well defined. “The Strand,” as Fran Lebowitz has said, “is a monument to the immortality of the written word and hence beloved writers.” It is an enormous, overstuffed place where just about any book can be found, even—and especially—the one you didn’t know you were looking for. Not for nothing do the store’s red awnings boast 18 MILES OF BOOKS. And it is just as much a place to find people as it is books: from its eccentric staff, deeply in love with books, to the writers, intellectuals, and artists who have long gathered there, to the New Yorkers and tourists of every stripe roaming the stacks. As Pete Hamill has written, the Strand is “an institution … as mixed, as diverse, as democratic, as intellectual, as high and low as the city itself … The Strand is [New York’s] great meeting corner.”
The last floor to be added to the store was the Rare Book Room, in 2003. The walls of the loft-like space are covered in floor-to-ceiling shelves filled with hard-to-find and unusual volumes—from signed first editions of beloved twentieth century novels to small-run art books to mysterious, ancient tomes on the occult. Oriental rugs in deep maroons and blues dot the floor along with overstuffed leather chairs—like the library of some eccentric, prodigious collector.
It was this feeling—the serendipity, the variety, the happy collision of books, ideas, and people—that we tried to capture in our reading series up in the Rare Book Room. The goal was to match writers with other writers: two (or more) equals on stage for freewheeling, candid conversations on their work, their craft, their likes, their dislikes. Some of the conversations gathered here are between old, dear friends, like Mark Strand and Charles Wright, or Hilton Als and Junot Díaz, or Tina Chang and Tracy K. Smith. Others feature great admirers who had never met (or met only briefly), like Renata Adler and David Shields, or Téa Obreht and Charles Simic. In all cases, the result is every bit as electrifying and edifying as the store itself.
—Jessica Strand