Benjamin Bass, Fourth Avenue and the Depression, 1927.

The Strand started on a street full of bookshops. Publishers Weekly, in its obituary of Fred Bass published on 3 January 2018, says the store was founded in 1927 by his father, Benjamin Bass, with a small sum he had saved and an equal amount he had borrowed. Wikipedia says Benjamin Bass had emigrated from Lithuania and worked as a messenger, salesman and subway construction worker before he found the used-book district on Fourth Avenue, that an earlier shop of his, the Pelican Book Shop, had not succeeded, and that he named the new store after the Strand, the street in London. It adds that in the early years he slept on a cot in the shop.

Fourth Avenue gave the store its setting. Publishers Weekly describes the stretch of Fourth Avenue between Eighth Street and 14th Street as the district known in the mid-20th century as Book Row, home to more than 30 used bookstores, and calls the Strand the last survivor of that row. Wikipedia says Book Row had been established as early as 1890, that the shops began to disappear in the 1930s during the Great Depression and again in the 1950s as rents rose, and that the Strand came through the Depression on Benjamin Bass’s network of contacts and a landlord from the Stuyvesant family who carried it through lean years.

The next generation grew up in the shop. Publishers Weekly says that by the start of the Second World War Fred Bass, then a boy, was working in the store and travelling around the city to buy books for it to sell, and that after graduating from Brooklyn College and serving in the Korean War he gave the rest of his working life to bookselling. Wikipedia says Fred took over the business in 1956 and the following year moved the store from Fourth Avenue to the corner of Broadway and East 12th Street, two blocks south of Union Square, where the main store remains.

Broadway, review copies, Books by the Foot and a landmark.

On Broadway the store grew floor by floor. Wikipedia says it spread across the whole ground floor of its building and then over its lower three floors in the 1970s, and that Fred Bass bought the building in 1996. Publishers Weekly says Bass became known for a deep and seemingly random stock and for some unconventional practices: he openly bought galleys and advance reading copies from literary critics and sold these “reviewer’s copies” at half the cover price, to the annoyance of some publishers.

A second Bass joined in the 1980s. Publishers Weekly says Nancy Bass, Fred’s daughter, joined the business in 1986 and co-managed the store with her father, and that the same year the Strand launched its Books by the Foot department, which assembles custom collections chosen to suit a customer’s literary taste or the colour of their décor. Wikipedia credits Nancy Bass Wyden with setting up that department, with leading the renovation and expansion of 2005, which added an elevator and air conditioning and reorganised the floors, and with the rollout of the store’s own merchandise, including T-shirts and totes.

The family handover came in two steps. Wikipedia says Nancy Bass Wyden became co-owner when her father retired in November 2017, and Publishers Weekly reported his death on 3 January 2018, saying she would continue to oversee operations. Nancy Bass Wyden has owned the Strand since 2018. Wikipedia lists other outlets over the years, including a Strand Book Annex near South Street Seaport from the 1980s until 2008, a summer kiosk in Times Square from 2016, a kiosk in Central Park, and an Upper West Side store opened in July 2020.

The building itself became a city landmark. A press release from the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission dated 11 June 2019 announced the designation that day of seven buildings on Broadway between East 12th and East 14th streets, built between 1876 and 1902, and its chair, Sarah Carroll, named the Strand among the cultural associations they carry. NY1 reported the next day that the commission had cited the building’s architecture and its role as the shop’s home for more than 60 years.

A London street name, a mileage sign and a red oval.

A bookshop’s identity usually reaches people on the street before they open a single book. The fascia sign above the window carries the name to passers-by, and it has to stay legible from across a road, often on a frontage the shop does not own and cannot change much. Inside, the same name turns up again at smaller sizes: on the paper bag at the till, on a printed bookmark slipped between pages, on a gift card and on a website. Many shops add a tote bag, which travels further than any sign, carried through other streets and on other shoulders. Because these pieces are made in different materials and by different suppliers, the mark tends to be simple enough to print in one colour on paper, cloth or plastic without losing its shape.

Much of the visible identity, though, is the shop itself. Shelf labels, section signs and table cards organise thousands of titles, and their type and colour set a tone as clearly as the logo does. Lighting, floor materials, staircases, the height of the shelves and the position of a café or a gallery all shape how a room feels, and regular customers come to recognise a shop by these details as much as by its name. Chains face a second task: one name may sit above stores of very different sizes and ages, sometimes beside older names kept from earlier businesses. For designers, the practical point is that a bookshop identity is a set of placements — a sign, a bag, a bookmark, a label, a room — and each needs a version of the mark that works at its size and in its material.

Miles of books on a sign, and a logo on a bag.

The Strand’s slogan is a measurement. Publishers Weekly says that for decades a sign in front of the main store advertised “8 miles of books”, and that the 2005 expansion led the store to change it to “18 miles of books”. Wikipedia describes “18 Miles of Books” as the company’s slogan, printed on its stickers, T-shirts and other merchandise. NY1, reporting on the landmark vote in June 2019, opened with the same phrase.

The tote bag carries the mark around the city. Book Riot, in an essay published on 21 June 2017, said the plain tote with the red Strand logo appeared in the 1980s, when Nancy Bass began working alongside her father, and that the store’s range of totes and pouches had since grown to include collaborations with Kate Spade. Robb Report, in a piece republished in Singapore on 15 September 2022, described a limited collection with Bottega Veneta, whose creative director Matthieu Blazy reworked the store’s canvas tote in leather; it said all three versions kept the logo in red with white lettering and that the release came with a curated book selection by Blazy and cartoons commissioned from The New Yorker.

The name links the shop to another city’s street. Wikipedia says Benjamin Bass took it from the Strand in London, and the store has kept it through two moves of address within Manhattan and three generations of the Bass family. Fred Bass’s Books by the Foot service and the sale of review copies, both described by Publishers Weekly, gave the shop other identities in the trade, but the red logo and the mileage line are the parts that travel on bags, stickers and shirts.

For a design guide, Strand Book Store shows how a used-book shop can turn a sign out front and a red logo on a canvas bag into a portable identity, while keeping a name borrowed from London in 1927. Compare Shakespeare and Company, an English-language bookshop in Paris with its own name borrowed from literature, and Barnes & Noble, a New York bookseller that grew into a national chain. For this guide we use red, canvas and black with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Strand Book Store’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.