![]() ![]() Martin, who named the store-after the Chaplin film-but sold his share after two years), and was, according to its website, the country’s first all-paperback bookstore. This, Executive Director Elaine Katzenberger told Literary Hub, “was an intentionally democratizing move at a time when most books were still sold in hardcover only.” One of the most famous Beat strongholds, City Lights was founded in 1953 by poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti (and Peter D. When a business continues to exist mostly because its owners like it, the next generation has to like it just as much. ![]() The ground floor of 828 Broadway is worth more as a Trader Joe’s than it is selling Tom Wolfe. We also have the best and most diverse art book selection in New York, and possibly in the world.”īut what about the future? As Christopher Bonanos put it in New York Magazinein 2014: “the Strand is, when you get down to it, a real-estate business, fronted by a bookstore subsidized by its own below-market lease and the office tenants upstairs. “We have the best range of used books, including recently published titles. “The Strand is part of an extinct breed of bookstores in New York City,” one employee told Literary Hub. In 1956, Fred Bass, Benjamin’s son, took over bookstore operations, and the next year, he moved the store to its current location. Now, the Strand famous not only for its enormous selection of new, used, and rare books, but also its “books by the foot” sales and the quiz its employees have to ace. Fred Bass died earlier this year his daughter Nancy Bass Wyden is now the owner. With its famous 18 miles of books, it seems it may have eaten a few of the others. It is now the only bookstore from Book Row left in business (due, apparently, to the Bass family’s relationship to the family that owned many of the buildings on the blocks in question). Imagine a New York City in which 48 bookstores were happily (and, one presumes, profitably) crammed into a five-block stretch of what was then Fourth Avenue, a stretch known as “Book Row.” It was here that a Lithuanian immigrant named Benjamin Bass founded the Strand in 1927. According to the store’s website, it was because Beach didn’t want to sell book to Nazis: But the bookstore was forced to close during the occupation of Paris in WWII. It was from this location that Beach published Joyce’s Ulysses, and where Joyce, along with Ernest Hemingway, Djuna Barnes, Ezra Pound, Anaïs Nin, Julio Cortázar,James Baldwin, etc etc etc, hung out. When the store outgrew its walls a few years later, she moved it to the rue de l’Odéon. Shakespeare and Company is often described as the most famous bookstore in the world-but which one is the most famous? There have actually been three versions of what is often described as the most famous bookstore in the world: the first was opened by Sylvia Beach in 1919 on the rue Dupuytren. Which is only to say that I’d love to hear about which international bookstores are most famous in the minds of readers in other countries-whether the list is very similar or very different. NB that fame, literary and otherwise, necessarily depends on your viewpoint, and because of where I’m standing, this list has something of an American bias. On the occasion of this, her 131st birthday, I was inspired to look into the history of Beach and the bookstore-as well as the stories behind some of the other best, most visited, and most talked-out bookstores around the world. Yesterday was the anniversary of the birth of Sylvia Beach-probably the most notorious bookstore owner in modern history, and the founder of what is still arguably the most famous bookstore in the world: Paris’s Shakespeare and Company.
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