Where the Books Are: Is the Long Tail just a Strand Theory?
FREE! food and an open bar lent a new meaning to “social media” a few weeks ago. Sponsored by Publisher’s Weekly and the AARP (more on those odd bedfellows another time), the event drew lots of folks from the worlds of books, magazines, newspapers, and even a few TV stations to the Strand Bookstore in lower Manhattan. The celebration was in honor of the 80th birthday of the Strand.
By way of background you should know that The Strand Bookstore (Broadway at 12th) first opened its doors in 1927. In addition to the miracle of still being in business for all these years, The Strand is also famous for buying tons of used books, having the largest rare books collection in NYC, having an extensive collection of art books (which you can rent by the foot if you are an interior designer or set decorator), and with 55,000 sf of space, it also boasts “18 miles of books.” That’s a lot of shelf space and certainly qualifies The Strand , IMHO, as a Long Tail resale retailer.
At the party, many notable authors (Gay Talese, Art Spiegelman, Frank McCourt, Pete Hamill, Fran Lebowitz, Adam Gopnik, Kurt Andersen) took turns at the microphone and talked about their very personal relationship with the store, some going back 30 or 40 years. What struck me was that they all felt a sense of reverence and wonder for The Strand because it was a place where the synchronicity of the moment led them to discover something new and life changing on the shelves. This was due in no small measure to the fact that the used books contained a healthy percentage of out-of-print titles that simply didn’t exist anywhere else, even in libraries. You could tell that these moments of discovery were burned deep into the author’s memories as they could vividly recall a specific book or two that they “bumped into” at The Strand and how it changed their life. While these transformational moments speak to the power of books, they also point towards the Long Tail because without the Strand’s ”18 miles of books”, without all of the forgotten outliers that aren’t on any current bestseller lists, these little bits magic have no stage to play upon.
So I’ll leave you pondering a few questions: If you’re a writer, is searching around on Google enough of an invitation to your muse? Is digital enough? Or, do you need, on occassion, to go out into the dusty stacks, hold some brittle pages in your hands, and bump into the Long Tail in person? From listening to the authors at The Strand, I get the distinct impression that if you do, you might just grab onto something that is going to take you for a wonderful ride.
Gary Ward
Topics: Chris Anderson, Events, Retail |
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