Sometimes it is the small catastrophes that get your nerve after the big ones. Even New Yorkers, who rarely get upset. But when they found a call for help from the Strand Bookstore on their social media channels last weekend, it was good. Hypergentrification, Trump, Corona and now that?
The message was written by Nancy Bass Wyden, granddaughter of the company’s founder Benjamin Bass, who has run the bookstore on 12th Street and Broadway for two years. “We need your help. This is the post we never wanted to write.” Corona caused sales to collapse by 70 percent. Soon be over.
That sat. Because the Strand Bookstore is not only in a row with the Shakespeare & Company in Paris, the El Ateneo in Buenos Aires and the City Lights in San Francisco as one of the holy places of the book trade. For New Yorkers, the beach is a spiritual home, refuge and place for countless intellectual initiation rites. Rock stars like Patti Smith and Tom Verlaine worked here before their fame as salespeople, writers and playwrights like Sam Shepard, Mary Gaitskill and Luc Sante. That is why the shop has been featured in countless films, series and books as a place for New York as the capital of literary intellectualism. In Sofia Coppola’s new film “On the Rocks”, for example, the leading actress Rashida Jones carries a beach cloth bag with her Chanel bag to signal that her character not only has money but also a spirit.
There is a good chance that even a short visit to the city will land you on the beach. “18 Miles of Books” was the motto in the tone of the New York barking, with which the “world’s best pizza” and “America’s most famous hot dog” are touted. The approximately 29 kilometers of shelves are no exaggeration. Whoever enters the three-story shop gets lost in the twilight between the rows of steel frames that are filled to the ceiling. You find books that you didn’t even know you had to have. The review copies of the host of New York critics for sale, returned goods and used items lie in piles.
This typical smell of old books triggers a feeling of happiness in most people
If you bring a lot of money, you can also go to the cupboards and the back room, where the first editions and treasures are stored. And above everything lies that aroma that envelops you like a cocoon in shops full of old books. It is a fragrance blend of hundreds of chemical compounds that release ink, glue, cellulose and lignins when they break down. Smithsonian Institute researchers once described this aroma as: “A combination of grassy notes with a hint of acidity and a hint of vanilla over an underlying mustiness. This distinctive smell is as much a part of the book as its contents.”
In most people, this scent triggers a feeling of happiness that is deeply rooted in childhood. No wonder the looming end of Strand Bookstore sparked a wave of horror across the city.
Now, New Yorkers have always had to be brave about the places they remembered. The writer Colson Whitehead wrote in his essay “The Colossus of New York” that one is only a real New Yorker when one sees the city through the filter of the vacant lots of one’s own biography. When you can sigh at more and more corners because something is missing there and there is nothing left here. “You are a New Yorker when what was before is more real and more solid than what is there now.” You don’t even have to live there. There are plenty of visitors who understood the city better than some who moved there for the wrong reasons.
Because of this, there are a few places that are sacred to New Yorkers. In 1927, the Lithuanian immigrant Benjamin Bass founded his bookstore on Book Row on Fourth Avenue and named it after the Strand publishing house in London. His son Fred moved the store to Broadway in 1957. In 1996 he bought the building, which is the reason that the beach has survived over the past few years despite the real estate boom, Amazon and the urban exodus of the educated middle class.
But then Corona is a size bigger. The Strand Bookstore has already had to lay off 118 of the 230 employees. All events with which the store makes a lot of sales have been canceled. Nancy Bass Wyden’s call for help had an impact. Already in the morning the customers stood in line. The website received more than 10,000 orders. Loyalty could not even be dampened by the gossip that Bass Wyden had a two-digit million fortune and bought Amazon shares during the crisis.
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