The Strand Bookstore at 828 Broadway, on the southwest corner of East 12th Street in Manhattan, has occupied its current location since 1956. It was founded by Benjamin Bass in 1927, on a stretch of Fourth Avenue then known as Book Row, and is the last surviving shop of the forty-eight independent bookshops that once made that strip the densest concentration of bookselling in North America.
The shop claims, on its signage and on its tote bags, eighteen miles of books. The figure has been disputed by trade press for decades. It is, by the current management's quiet admission, somewhat inflated and somewhat conservative depending on how one counts the basement and the rare-book room.
What is not in dispute is that the Strand carries the largest used-book inventory of any retail bookshop currently operating in the United States.
The shop's frontage on Broadway includes, for most of the year, between eight and twelve wheeled wooden carts arranged on the sidewalk outside the main entrance. The carts hold used books priced at one, two, three, and five dollars.
The dollar cart, in particular, has a status in New York bookselling that exceeds its actual revenue contribution. It is the most photographed feature of the shop. It is the entry point for a meaningful percentage of customers who eventually venture inside. It is, in the trade's understanding, a piece of bookselling theatre that the Strand's management has maintained with conscious editorial intent for at least four decades.
On a Thursday evening in early June, the carts are wheeled in at 10:25 p.m., five minutes before the shop's posted closing time of 10:30.
The wheeling-in is performed by two members of the shop's evening crew, a young man named Felix Ortiz and a young woman named Hana Kim, both of whom have worked at the Strand for less than two years and both of whom perform the closing ritual with the economy of motion of people who have done it three hundred times.
The carts roll heavily. The wheels rattle. The cobblestoned section of sidewalk in front of the Strand has, over seventy years, been worn into a shallow trough by the daily passage of the carts.
Before the carts are wheeled in, however, there is the markdown. At approximately 10:15, Ortiz emerges from the shop with a stack of small white cards reading FREE, and begins distributing them onto the dollar cart at a rate of one card per ten or so books. The free designation applies only to the cart's most damaged titles — water-stained paperbacks, books with broken spines, books that have, in the trade's blunt language, become unsellable.
On the Thursday in question, approximately forty titles on the dollar cart receive the free designation. Ortiz announces this development to the four or five customers browsing the cart with a brief, undramatised: Anything with a card on it is yours.
What follows is the closest thing the Strand carts have to drama. A man in a Mets cap who has been browsing for forty-five minutes immediately gathers seven of the free books into a stack — a damaged hardback of The Power Broker, three water-damaged Penguin paperbacks, a 1982 trade paperback of Sophie's Choice, a cookbook from 1976, and a battered hardback of Susan Sontag's On Photography with the dust jacket missing.
He puts the stack into a canvas tote bag he has produced from a pocket of his jacket. He walks down Broadway in the direction of Union Square without ceremony.
A graduate student in her mid-twenties, recognised by Ortiz as a regular, takes only two free books — a 1991 edition of The Wretched of the Earth with significant cover damage, and a 1965 hardback of John Williams's Stoner that is, on inspection, in worse condition than its free status had suggested.
She thanks Ortiz, who nods. She walks east on 12th Street.
By 10:23 the carts are emptier. The free books are mostly gone. The remaining dollar titles — perhaps a hundred of them — are pushed together at one end of the cart, and the cart itself is then wheeled, with effort, through the front doors of the shop and into a narrow service corridor that runs along the right-hand side of the ground floor.
Hana Kim wheels the second and third carts. The fourth, which has been outside since 9 a.m., is brought in by both of them together. By 10:31, the sidewalk is clear and the steel grates over the windows have begun to descend.
What happens to the dollar-cart inventory overnight is the answer to a question that the Strand's frequent customers have asked for years. It is stored in the service corridor, on rolling racks, until 8 a.m., when the morning shift wheels the carts back out to the sidewalk and re-prices any titles that the previous day's customers have shuffled.
Approximately one hundred new titles are added to the dollar carts each day. They come from a stream of used-book buy-ins that the Strand processes continuously — somewhere between five hundred and two thousand books per day, depending on the season — at a buying counter in the basement.
The basement counter, run by a buyer named Theresa Mendelsohn who has worked at the Strand since 2008, is the operational heart of the shop's used-book business. It is also, as Mendelsohn will note if asked, the most consistently underestimated part of the shop's economics.
The dollar carts, in revenue terms, account for perhaps three percent of the Strand's annual sales. In customer-acquisition terms, they may account for substantially more.
By 10:40 the shop is closed. The Strand's posted closing time has been observed within five minutes, which by Manhattan standards is on time. The interior lights begin to switch off floor by floor — first the third-floor rare-book room, then the second floor, then the basement.
The ground-floor lights stay on the longest. Through the steel grate over the front window, one can see the long fiction tables in the half-dark, the rows of paperbacks face-out, and the silhouettes of Ortiz and Kim moving slowly down the central aisle, checking shelves and counting tills.
By 11:02 the last lights are off. The shop will reopen at 9 a.m. on the Friday. The carts, in the service corridor, hold the books that did not sell on the Thursday, waiting to be wheeled out, browsed, and, in some unknowable proportion, sold or marked free and given away in another twelve hours.