Strand Bookstore
Ben Bass opened the Strand in 1927 with $300 of his own money and $300 borrowed from a friend. His own book collection was the stock. A cigar box was the till.1
Why go
Bass came from Lithuania by way of Hartford and reached New York as a teenager. He worked subway construction and ran messages. Then he fell for Book Row. That was the run of Fourth Avenue between 9th and 14th Streets. It held as many as forty-eight used bookshops.4 He named his own shop for the London street where Dickens and George Eliot lived.4 Through the Depression his landlord, an heir of Peter Stuyvesant's, let him trade rent free until he could repay. The Stuyvesants later doubled rents along the row and left his alone. Every other shop on Book Row is gone. This one is not.4
Ben's son Fred started at thirteen. In 1957 he moved the store to 12th Street and Broadway.1 Christopher Bonanos, writing for New York Magazine, found him at eighty-six and still buying books four days a week. He turned down most of what walked in. An unsalable book is deadweight on a shelf another book could have.3 That is why the stacks reward a second visit. Fred's daughter Nancy runs it now. The flagship holds more than 2.5 million used, new and rare books over eighteen miles of shelving.1
The food part is new. The shop put in its first coffee counter on 25 June 2022, with beans from Brooklyn Roasting Company. Melissa Kravitz Hoeffner reported for Time Out New York that it was the first change of that kind since 1927.8 Cafe Fred opened at the flagship in February 2026. It pours La Colombe and sells Ole and Steen pastries.9
Order this / avoid
- Order: off the used food and drink stacks. That is where the out-of-print New York restaurant cookbooks land. The Russian Tea Room's was $10 and the Waldorf-Astoria's was $16 on the New York regional shelf in September 2026.10
- Order: a coffee at Cafe Fred, then work the dollar carts outside. The shop reckons they are some of the best deals in the city.1
- Avoid: treating that counter as lunch. Coffee, tea and pastry is the whole of it.9
What locals & experts say
- Fred Bass, to Bonanos in November 2014, on why the shelves keep moving:
Our stock isn't stale,
he says.You come in, and there'll be new stuff continually.
3 - Fred Bass, as the shop itself prints him: he was
born with book dust in his veins.
1 - Nancy Bass Wyden, on East 12th Street on 11 June 2019, immediately after the Landmarks Preservation Commission voted to landmark the 1902 building over her objection:
Now, we're in a bureaucratic straight jacket.
5 - Nancy Bass Wyden, on naming the cafe for her father:
Naming Cafe Fred after my dad felt like a natural choice.
9
Good to know
- It nearly went. Christopher Robbins reported for Gothamist in October 2020 that revenues had fallen around 70 percent. Wyden had written to customers asking them to buy.6
- The staff struck in December 2024. David Brand and Ramsey Khalifeh reported for Gothamist that 110 unionized workers walked out over base pay. They wanted $16 an hour to become $18 in the first year of the contract. I haven't found a report of how it settled.7
- There are five Strands. This page is the Broadway flagship. The others stand on Columbus Avenue and at 2020 Broadway near Lincoln Center. There is a kiosk at Fifth Avenue and 60th Street, and a shop in Terminal B at LaGuardia.2
- Check what is on before you go. The shop hosts in-store events nearly every night. Its own roll of past guests runs from Patti Smith to Ai Weiwei.1
Verdict
could-visit — Take the Union Square door, give it an hour you are not counting, and buy the thing you cannot order tonight from your phone.