The Strand Bookstore Quotes

Mostly I was spending time in the Strand, that bastion of titillating erudition. Not so much a bookstore as a collision of 100 different bookstores, with literary wreckage strewn over 18 miles of shelves.

Some bookstores want you to believe they're a community center. Like they need to host a cookie making class class in order to sell you some Proust. But the Strand leaves you completely on your own. Caught between the warring forces of organization and idiosyncrasy, with idiosyncrasy winning every time.

It is not just bookstores and libraries that are disappearing but museums, theaters, performing arts centers, art and music schools— all those places where I felt at home have joined the list of endangered species. The San Francisco Chronicle, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe and my own hometown paper, The Washington Post, have all closed their weekend book review sections, leaving books orphaned and stranded, poor cousins to television and the movies. In a sign of the times, the Bloomberg News website recently transferred its book coverage to the Luxury section, alongside yachts, sports clubs and wine, as if to signal that books are an idle indulgence of the super-rich. But if there is one thing that should not be denied to anyone rich or poor it is the opportunity to dream.

The Strand proudly proclaims itself as home to eighteen miles of books. I have no idea how this is calculated. Does one stack all the books on top of each other to get the eighteen miles? Or do you put them end to end, to create a bridge between Manhattan and, say, Short Hills, New Jersey, eighteen miles away? Were there eighteen miles of shelves? No one knew. We all just took the bookstore at its word, because if you couldn’t trust a bookstore, what could you trust? Whatever

The Creative Gene will form connections—strands—between me and you, and maybe new memes will be made. Toward that hope, I will once again visit a bookstore today and search for strands that I have not yet seen.

Webster Street is one of the nicer areas in Chamber, which is one of the nicer towns in Florida. It has about thirty-five thousand people, a couple of decent movie theatres, a bookstore where the owner calls me whenever a new Flip the Weasel cartoon collection comes out, nice schools, nice parks, nice restaurants, and a guy who mutters memorable television quotes while wandering the streets giving the finger to unsuspecting motorists. If you're ever looking to relocate, you could do much worse.

Predation isn't merely a pricing and wage practice; it is also a political practice: one of its most powerful tools is local or state subsidies. In 2018, when Amazon was offered $3 billion in state subsidies to locate a new facility in New York City, the owner of the Strand, the legendary Union Square bookstore, wasn't having it. She told the New York Times, 'The richest man in America, who is a direct competitor, has just been handed $3 billion in subsidies.' The basic insight in her complaint is essential: any subsidy that goes to a particular firm necessarily hurts its competitors.

Hiroko Minagawa. I’d heard the name before, but I hadn’t read any of her books. My pride as a daily browser of bookstores was deeply wounded.

I still go to a bookstore as close to every day as I possibly can—because bookstores are where I make new encounters.

Princess Diana, he’d called her, and he’d say, “Nothing is too good for my little girl.” Every Saturday they spent together would end with the two of them browsing at a bookstore—sometimes the Waldenbooks in the nearby mall, sometimes the Strand in New York City. Her father would let her buy a stack of books as high as her knee.

Princess Diana, he’d called her, and he’d say, “Nothing is too good for my little girl.” Every Saturday they spent together would end with the two of them browsing at a bookstore—sometimes the Waldenbooks in the nearby mall, sometimes the Strand in New York City. Her father would let her buy a stack of books as high as her knee (67).