Strand Bookstore – NYC
// September 16th, 2009 // No Comments » // book store, review
I suddenly realized that the true power of a blog is that you can blog about the most trivial of things that only you find interesting and then hope that the fabled long tail of cyberspace places this piece in front of someone who finds it interesting or annoying.
Strand is my favorite bookstore in New York. I like standalones. I like standalone coffee shops, standalone restaurants etc. But unlike other standalones, where that extra something that keeps them afloat in this era of conglomerate uniformity is costly, Strand is notoriously cheap. This place is not for the weak bibliophile. Strategically located at 12th and Broadway, it boasts of housing the largest number of books at any one store location. The outside is littered by weathered bookshelves improvised with wheels to their base that are a book bargain hunter’s mecca. You have spent quite a few afternoons loittering this half a block crashing elbows with others. The outdoor collection is more than decade-old zagat surveys and tour guides and you have picked a few classics from here – Cancer Ward by Solzhenistyn and Bleak House by Dickens each for just a dollar(+ plus some tax; grrr… ny).
You enter and there is a visual overload of books! There are books everywhere but not in the Barnes&Noble come-sit–and-sip-coffee way. There are no defined aisles. There is a swarm of oscillation and sometimes you can move into or away from this brownian-like motion. As you enter there is a bag check to your left and on the right is a closed cabinet of old books, and in front of that a selection of that season’s fashionable readings – you always find them boring. Moving on, there are 3 tables of the latest in paperback both fiction and nonfiction. The store knows that most people here are looking for the best while still being pretty cheap. The hardbounds and the new releases combined with staff’s recommendations are dumped into a box-like basket. There is a New York City books and other photo collections table near it – you wish you could buy the lot. On the other side of the basket are large stacks of nutrition, health and cooking books – you have never picked a book from that part of the store. As you wade your way through the sea of people carrying shopping baskets filled with books you find yourself in staring at a fine choice of history, economics and sociology reads. You remember you picked up Capitalism.. by Schumpeter, struggled hard but were steadfast and kept a Hayek back on it stack and sneaked glanced through most of Media by Eco – which brings you to the most interesting part of strand – there are no places to sit and read. There is a small table dedicated to all things Chomsky and before you can go further in you realize that what you thought was contigous wall is actually mamoth steel bookshelves facing sideways housing large hardbounds and folios with topics that revolve around war & history. This is a diffcult place to find a specific title. The store help is always around, with the titles in genre and then author classification it could be tiring if you wish to find a particular one quickly. If you have patience and bad taste then you can find a lot of great books here. You boast of finding ‘The War for all the Oceans‘ here – discounted and then further discount and finally sold away for $3.45. As the grip of claustrophobia tightens and you find yourself back in the main thoroughfare of book buying there is a corner dedicated to true crime, mystery and fantasy. If you were flipping pages of the latest in healthy cooking and missed out on the maze of old history texts but moved past the references and dictionaries you would find yourself in the classics section. You can find cheap classic paperbacks – the thin off white pages and weak binding but also those small leathered hardbound collections that you remember seeing only in college libraries. Now irrespective of the path you have taken you find that behind you is the fantasy section and infront are tables with stacks of the most popular in science fiction and music literature. Past that and ignoring those narrow sanctums of ‘Fiction by Author’ you are at the poetry, movies and plays desk still books all around, but the shelves have rather old books unless you are looking for something specific. And so you look around and ask if there are any books on business or science and you are directed to the basement. What ! there is another level of this method-in-madness.
You snake your way back to where you started and find there are stairs that plunge into this basement. You step lightly below, and the rush is far less. Ah, most people have assumed that these storage or basement books are somehow of lower quality – so not true. Right infront is the counter with the store help that can direct you to a book, stashed behind them are requests people have made for pickup, and you wonder if shopping for a book that did not have the immediate gratification of stroking the spine of a book would you request one and then come all the way again to pick it up ? So that shelve is indication of the number of people who have heard of amazon or half. You stop at the first table you see its got all of popular science lumped together. You pucker your nose at this bad taste and walk right towards the business titles, they are a respectable collection, but if you were looking for that specific tom peters’s management bible you probably wont find. Moving on you find that you are suddenly in the middle of some crazy combination of religious, philosophical, mystic and epistmelogical titles, you are amused that they are next to the business section but more amused to find richard dawkins and christopher hitchens on the table that says ‘Religion’ ! Theres a dark aisle of books curiously marked ‘Self Help’ thats the first label that you have clearly read since you stepped into this store and now you pretend to coolly drift away through philosophy titles and find yourself in stranger realms of sociology and social work. You move on to find old science books – once heralding the next big thing in science and technology some of these are more than a decade old, as you ponder when exactly will your car start flying you glance at complex mathematic titles. Not those math dumbed down for mainstream that you read but advanced graduate/professional mathematic literature that makes you blink twice and you wonder if this the best use of the real estate. You dont want to go back to the helpdesk, so you hug the shelves nearer to the back wall and turn up in an sanctum sanctorum (similar to the ones in north indian temples) of health and disease titles. Pretending to be interested you walk briskly what seems forward but your are not sure anymore – the internal compass is awry. Skirting the journalism section you want to rant about Fox News to the columbia student reading Robert Fisk but you are prudent, you are an explorer and not very funny when trying to be sarcastic. And there its is the oddity you could not imagine – the ‘review’ section. Books that showed up for review and never took off. It is a discouraging section of wannabes, but occassional you can find a gem – a ‘review’ book that made it big and the store overlooked a mis-shelved copy. If you find it such an entity its yours to keep at a 60% discount, good luck. You want to outsmart every one but tough luck; you move on. A box of audio books, you stare at without paying any attention, the crampy air is getting to you, you look around if you missed any corner and there – aptly under the staircase is the occult section you stand back and realize that the business titles are between occult and philosophy you look around to see if anyone else found that funny. Maybe it wasnt that funny, your parikrama is complete and you race up the stairs to level above.
You are back on the main floor, there is but a small attic perched up above. Arsty books for artsy people. The potential buyers of these books – pink haired, striped tights wearing NYU liberals sneer at you and you wish you could prove that you are a libetarian by body language – you give up, sulk and amble down with earthy nonchalance towards others. You calculate if that slow headflick of contempt would be too belligerent in this made up fist fight of disdain. You are too meek, you sulk a little more. Looking at the khadi cloth bags with Strand’s name on it you quickly convert its price into rupees, dismiss it as being too exorbitant and quickly walk past the purchase counters and out of the store before they could label you as a lurker.
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