78 The EconomistJanuary 20th 2018
A
CROSS the buying counter at the Strand
Book Store, which is as worn and bat-
tered as an old school desk, has flowed
much of the secondhand-book trade of the
city of New York. Dog-eared tomes in col-
lege bags; shiny review copies dropped in
by critics; bland boxes of publishers’ re-
mainders, and tantalising parcels from
private estates; leather-bound volumes
with uncut pages, and paperbacks rescued
by vagrants from the trash. The whole mo-
mentum of New York publishing and read-
ing seems to push towards that counter
where Fred Bass presided, building up his
stock from 70,000 in 1956 to 2.5m by the
1990s, and so rapidly exceeding his sales
space that many books also sit in a ware-
house at Sunset Park, in Brooklyn.
To this plenitude of books he was forev-
er adding more. Every day he approached
his counter like a small boy on a treasure-
hunt. And treasure did turn up: a first edi-
tion of James Joyce’s “Ulysses” (he paid
$7,000; resale price, $38,000), and a second
folio Shakespeare (sold for $100,000). Yet
the vibrantlife of the shop pleased him just
as much. From his counter he could survey
the crazily overstuffed main floor, man the
ever-ringing phone, and keep an eye on
people browsing the dollar carts outside
(“We prosecute everybody”). Gradually
the businesscovered so many creakywooden floors, branching out even to sat-
ellites at Central Park on Fifth Avenue and
the Flatiron District and elsewhere, that
what he could see was but a tiny portion of
the whole. Still, he could direct the flow.
His business was (and is) such a feature
at Broadway and 12th, with its1950s red fas-
cia, its lingering street browsers and its pa-
rade of white-on-red signs—“Open Seven
Days Until 10.30pm”, “Sell Your Books
Here”, “ASK US”—that it seemed to have
been there always. But he moved it there
from Fourth Avenue, from the dereliction
of what had once been the BookDistrict, in
1957, shortly after he took over from his fa-
ther Benjamin. The secondhand sector
was dying, and his father thought he
should try another trade. But by then Fred
had been thoroughly infected. The book-
dust he had been sweepingup since
schooldays had got into his blood, and he
never got it out. Working with his father, an
immigrant from Lithuania who had bat-
tled destitution by browsing and acquir-
ing, was sparky. But the pursuit of books
united them. He would lug the precious
bundles back on the subway, the rope dig-
ging into his hands. He supposed later that
their bookshop survived, when 50 or so
others went under, because his father had
taught him what he knew.
At the buying counter his father some-times yelled. Fred, when he assumed com-
mand, was quieter. With his three-piece
suits and neat beard, he looked more like
an Ivy League professor. The workings of
his mind, though, moved lightning-sharp
through price-scales, stock numbers and
prevailing taste. And his decision was final.
A biography of Hubert Humphrey? No-
body wanted to read abouthas-beens. A
canvas bag of hardbacks? At a glance, $15.
He mostly went by “feel”, losing his temper
only when he was offered books that were
dirty, or had no covers. “Are you reallytry-
ing to sell this?” he would ask. And he tried
to be fair, even to the down-and-outs. After
all, beside the pawnshop, this was almost
the only place in the city where you could
just walkin and sell stuff.
Towards staff he was also kind, though
not foolishly so. Their $10.50 an hour, at lat-
est rates, was hardly the New York living
wage, but with 60 folk a weeklining up to
work at the Strand he could obviously
name his price. In order to see what they
knew about books (since “Without good
people, you don’t have anything going”),
he devised a quiz to match ten authors
with ten works, from Homer onwards.
Hundreds failed. Equally testing was the
lack, until his daughter and co-manager
Nancy insisted on it 12 years ago, of central
air-conditioning in the store. Having
broiled by then in book-stacks through 70
New York summers, Fred saw no problem.
Modernity kept encroaching on his em-
porium, but he was sanguine about most
of it. Amazon did not seem to dent his
trade, especially since he had turned the
shop into such an icon of New York that
15% of the revenues now come from sales
of Strand T-shirts, tote-bags, mugs, socks
and scented candles. The store’s status in
the city reached a sort of apogee, for him,
on the night two officers from the Police
Department approached him as he was
closing up and asked him, shyly, whether
they might buy a T-shirt.Living and dead
One question often asked was why on
earth he needed more books, when those
he hadn’t yet sold were heaping up all
over. He had asked his father the same
thing, but soon understood. You couldn’t
sell a book you didn’t have. Besides, the
secondhand-book trade was not about old,
inert, long-accumulated things. It was
alive, and needed renewing all the time. As
fast as he was taking in fresh, lively books
at his counter, staff would be clearing far
shelves of all the dead, which would never
sell. And this philosophy seemed to ex-
plain a second question that arose: how in
one year, 2005, the store’s “8 Miles of
Books” suddenlybecame “18”. Some Jew-
ish patrons ofthe Strand pointed out that,
in Hebrew, 18 is also the numerical value of
the word chai—meaning “life”. 7Browsing at the Strand
Fred Bass, who built New York’s Strand Book Store into the largest secondhand
emporium in the world, died on January 3rd, aged 89ObituaryFred Bass