The Strand

Yesterday a friend introduced me to the Strand, a legendary bookstore in lower Manhattan. I’d never been there, and visiting was quite the experience.

What a store! The Strand is, simply put, a book lover’s dream: four floors of shelves and displays packed with every imaginable kind of novel, biography, history, book of poetry, work of historical fiction, collection of essays, or other form of printed reading material.

After browsing around the store, I’m convinced that if you can’t find a book at the Strand, the book probably doesn’t exist. Just looking for what was available about a randomly selected historical figure, I found multiple shelves of Thomas Jefferson biographies–probably more than 30, all told. Imagine what the Lincoln collection looks like!

One of the things I really liked about the Strand was the organization of volumes, by genre or some other unifying theme, on some eye-catching display tables in the center of the store. My favorite of these, shown below, was the collection of banned books–books that some benighted soul somewhere has concluded are too dangerous or improper for ordinary people to read. As I browsed around that table, I was glad to see that I have already read many of them.

On my next trip to NYC, I’ll make a point of stopping by the Strand–and making it a point to have a bit more carrying capacity.