Strand Book Store, the Manhattan shop that boasts more than “18 miles of books” within its Greenwich Village location, will be writing a sequel on the Upper West Side.
The store announced on its Twitter account Wednesday that it would be opening a second store at 450 Columbus Ave., between West 81st and 82nd Streets. The West Side Strand will replace two former independent book stores that recently closed: Endicott Books and Book Culture.
Strand says the new store will open this March to “bring all of our Strand goodness to such a vibrant community.”
“We are so excited to expand The Strand and engage the community of the Upper West Side. We aim to continue the legacy of my father, and his father before him, by bringing the joy of books to everyone,” Strand owner Nancy Bass Wyden said in a tweet.
Ben Bass opened Strand in 1927 on a spot along Fourth Avenue then known as “Book Row” for the number of bookshops clustered at the location. Thirty years later, Fred Bass, Ben’s son, moved the business to 828 Broadway, at East 12th Street, where it remains to this day serving generations of book lovers.
The Strand store boasts on its website of having an inventory exceeding 2.5 million used and new books — measuring more than 18 miles altogether if lined up end to end — across the four floors of its flagship location. They even devote an entire floor for rare books out of print for decades.
Strand has two smaller kiosks in Times Square and near Central Park. During the 1980s, Strand opened an “annex” book store near South Street Seaport, which relocated in 1996 to the corner of Fulton and Gold Streets in the Financial District. That shop closed in 2008.
