Fred Bass and Paul Secor, Strand Bookstore
 
Fred Bass grew up in the book business. At age ten, he started working in his father Benjamin’s Strand Bookstore (named for the famous publishing street in London, England) and took over management in 1956. Buyer Paul Secor’s tenure at the legendary New York City bookstore began 19 years later, when he landed a job shelving books in the warehouse. In a recent conversation with Bargain Book News , Bass and Secor shed some light on what it takes for the largest independent bookstore in the United States to compete on New York’s famous “Book Row of America.”
 
When did the Strand Bookstore open?
 
Bass: My father opened the original store on 4^th Avenue in 1927.
 
It’s still a family business, correct?
 
Bass: Yes. My daughter, Nancy, is the co-owner. (Editor’s note: Nancy Bass oversees the Strand’s unusual Books by the Foot service, which she launched in the 1980s. Basically, Nancy builds libraries for corporate clients such as hotels and movie and television sets including “The Sopranos” and “You’ve Got Mail.” She also creates home libraries for rich and famous figures like Steven Spielberg and Ralph Lauren. Rates range from $10 per linear foot for a customized selection of hardcover bargain books to $350 per linear foot for antique leather books.)
 
Paul, what is your role at the Strand?
 
Secor: I am the head buyer and help run the warehouse. I’ve been here almost 28 years. I walked in off the street and asked if they were hiring. I had been in New York for about three weeks. I asked, they said yes, and I started in the warehouse shelving books. I have been here ever since.
 
How would you describe the Strand in terms of the types of books you sell?
 
Bass: We do a little of everything – remainders, front list, used, rare books. We still describe ourselves as a used and antiquarian bookstore. But we have become very large, a little monstrously large. We have a little over 2.5 million books at this location, our main store. Unfortunately, not all of the books are on display. If you’re familiar with New York City, we’re located just south of Union Square, at the corner of Broadway and Twelfth Streets.
 
What percentage of the books is used?
 
Bass: I’d say at least fifty-percent of our business is used, rare, antiquarian, and out-of-print. Part of our business is remainders. We do a big job on remainders. Then we also do a big job on reviewers’ copies, which we distribute as used books. We also buy a lot of front list things to compete with the stores around here. We sell them at a discount.
 
You’re located on what has been called the “Bookman’s Mile,” “Bookseller’s Row,” and the “Book Row of America”? What stores are you competing with?
 
Bass: We’re surrounded by Barnes & Noble stores, so I don’t want my customers walking out of the store because I don’t have a book. We carry the kinds of front list things, those just being published, that our customers are interested in. So we might not have every title Barnes & Noble carries, but we have the things our customers want.
 
So there is more than one Barnes & Noble store near you?
 
Bass: We really are surrounded. We have a giant Barnes & Noble five blocks north of us. It is over 60,000-square-feet. It is probably one of the biggest stores in the world. We have another Barnes & Noble five blocks south of us, which is 45,000-square-feet. Then six blocks away, a little to the west, is their old store, the original store, which mainly sells textbooks, along with other categories. A little further, on 21^st Street and Sixth Avenue, is another giant Barnes & Noble that is a block long.
 
How can an independent compete with such a ubiquitous Barnes & Noble presence?
 
Bass: We are in a very highly competitive situation here and have to watch our pricing very carefully and what we buy in remainders and things like that.
 
Is it a different sort of customer who chooses to come to the Strand with its legendary “Eight miles of books”? (Editor’s note: current estimates actually have the books on display at closer to 16 miles.)
 
Bass: It’s an overlap and there is a lot of geography involved in terms of whatever is most convenient. We think we get a slightly different customer, but there is a tremendous overlap. If I take ten percent of their business away or they take ten percent of my business away, it affects us one way or another. In fact, I had a meeting with Riggio (Leonard Riggio, founder and chairman of Barnes & Noble, Inc.) not too long ago. I told him that when he opened up the big store north of us, our sales went up. And when he opened up the other one, our sales still went up. I asked him if he would open up another one so we can really cash in. He kind of laughed at that, but he said it just brings people into the area.
 
 
Today, there are three Strand locations – the main store, the Annex, and Hacker/Strand Art Books. Can you briefly describe each one and tell us where they are located?
 
Bass: I’ll start with the Hacker. The Hacker Art is strictly an art bookstore – art, photography, and the arts. That’s what it was when we bought it. Practically everything up there is an art book and we are keeping it that way. They sell a mixture of brand new art books, a lot of discount art books, and a lot of out-of-print and scarce things too. They have rare art books up there and have had a great following for many years. The Fulton store, known as the Annex, which is about 15,000-square-feet, contains mostly remainders, some front list material, and some of our quality used book stock we’ve moved down there. That store does very well with that mixture. It’s located further downtown, three blocks east of Broadway. The main store has everything. We’re in the process of expanding the store, which will take nine months to a year. We’re adding another floor so we will occupy six of the eleven floors in the building, which we own.
 
How many titles do you carry?
 
Bass: I don’t know. There are a lot of duplications of what we carry, so we can’t answer that. We buy thousands of books every day.
 
Since you say that the main store carries “everything,” then is your market everyone?
 
Bass: I have never been able to figure out who our market is. We get everyone in from young students to truck drivers to bankers to professors and just nice, wealthy cultural people who like books. We can’t pinpoint it because of the variety of what we sell. People will come in here for chess, higher mathematics, literature, art, and so on. A good deal of our business is the art books.
 
Where do you purchase remainders?
 
Bass: We do all the trade shows both here and in England. Then we have contacts with dozens and dozens of wholesale remainder people. We work very closely with a lot of the remainder houses. Also, some publishers call us. We will buy the remainders in limited amounts because I can’t buy 10,000 of a book.
 
When you buy a remainder, how deep do you buy?
 
Bass: It depends. If it is something we are not really sure of, but we like, we might go 25 or 50 copies. If it is something we know we can move, it could be 100 or 200 copies. Then we could go to 500 and occasionally higher than that.
 
Since your main stores carry such a varied stock, do you essentially buy across the board in terms of categories?
 
Bass: We buy in practically every field, but we won’t buy everything. We try to be selective for our market. In New York we have a fairly intellectual market.
 
How does the used book portion of your store operate?
 
Bass: We’re buying mostly private collections. People bring in books all day long. We have a buying counter here that is active all the time. For example, this morning somebody came in with 20 cartons and soon after him another had ten cartons. In between there were people with anywhere from one to 30 or 40 or 50 books, as many as they can carry.
 
Do you offer cash or trade or both?
 
Bass: We only give cash, even when they want trade. It is just simpler, cleaner, and leads to less problems. It leads to a clean transaction and most of the customers like that.
 
What kinds of front list books do you carry?
 
Bass: We buy a lot of front list, mainly in the art field but also scholarly books, quality books.
 
Do you buy directly from the publishers or from distributors?
 
Bass: Directly from the publishers, in most cases. We sell them for 20-percent or more off the cover price.
 
On the front list product, do you return much?
 
Bass: It depends on the publisher and what the setup is. Paul can probably answer that better than I can.
 
Secor: Considering how much front list we buy, we actually end up returning very little. I think we came into this primarily from remainders, which is, as you know, a non-returnable market, so all of our experiences in terms of buying and judging a market were on a non-returnable basis. That is how we approach the front list as well to minimize returns. So we do relatively well. Occasionally there is a title that doesn’t move, but basically very little gets returned.
 
Do you buy college books or textbooks?
 
Bass: We leave it to Barnes & Noble.
 
You also have an amazing booklover’s website, www.strandbooks.com , where customers can browse your shelves, purchase remainder and discounted front list titles and rare editions, buy gift certificates, and download a catalog. How long has that been in operation and what impact has it had on your business?
 
Secor: We have had the website for about a year-and-a-half to two years.
 
Bass: The site is coming along nicely. We are very pleased with it. We are selling quite a few books on it and we like what is moving out; it is pretty much across the board. I can’t really feel a pattern of what sells and what doesn’t sell, although the good books do sell on the website if the price is right. Pricing is very important on that website. You can’t compete with everybody because you have people operating out of garages and barns. For example, I just looked up two books on the website. Somebody had a book for $4.00 and there were prices all the way up to $80.00 on it. I have others that show $14.00 up to $495.00. I keep some samples on my desk just for fun.
 
Editor’s note: Current selections on www.strandbooks.com range from Antler, Bear, Canoe: A Northwest Alphabet by Betsy Bowen for $2.97 to a 1947 first edition of Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire for $2500.00.
 
How many people do you employee between the three stores?
 
Bass: As of this week, we are up to 220, I believe.
 
Do you have good employee retention and do you have a training program for new employees?
 
Bass: They train on-the-job. They come to work the first day and are put to work putting books alphabetically on the shelf. That’s their basic training. We have been lucky with employees. We have a fairly good staff and the ones that aren’t good we manage to get rid of very fast. You can tell pretty fast whether somebody can work and somebody can read and somebody is compatible.
 
What is your greatest challenge today?
 
Bass: I think the real challenge is getting good books at a price that can they can be sold at. As long as we have good books we are going to have customers buying them. We have survived the superstores so far. In fact, Barnes & Noble went after us a few years back and opened up a big outlet store with used books to compete with us. They ended up closing it.
 
Maryellen Duckett is a Tennessee-based freelance writer for National Geographic Traveler, Family Fun, and On the Road with Hampton magazines. She and her husband, Randall, are co-authors of the family travel books 100 Secrets of the Smokies and 100 Secrets of the Carolina Coast (Rutledge Hill Press).