Benjamin Bass arrived in the United States from Lithuania at seventeen. He worked as a messenger, a salesman, and a subway construction laborer before discovering Fourth Avenue's used-book district -- a stretch between Astor Place and Union Square that once held 48 bookstores. His first attempt, the Pelican Book Shop on Eighth Street, failed. In 1927, he opened the Strand, naming it after the London street famous for its publishers. The Great Depression wiped out many of his neighbors in the 1930s; rising rents eliminated most of the rest in the 1950s. One by one, the bookshops of Book Row disappeared. The Strand endured. Bass's son Fred took over in 1956 and moved the store to its present location at the corner of East 12th Street and Broadway the following year. Benjamin Bass died in 1978, but the family business was already in its second generation of stubbornness.

The slogan is printed on tote bags, T-shirts, and stickers that have become as much a part of New York street fashion as MetroCards and bodega coffee cups. "18 Miles of Books" refers to the total shelf length of the Strand's inventory -- a figure that, if anything, understates the experience of navigating the store. The main location at 828 Broadway sprawls across multiple floors, from the rare book room upstairs to the basement stacks of review copies. A major renovation in 2005 added an elevator, air conditioning, and a reorganization designed to make browsing easier. The Strand also sells its own line of bookish merchandise -- the totes and T-shirts alone account for over fifteen percent of revenue. Additional locations have opened and closed over the years: an annex at South Street Seaport in the 1980s, a branch in the Financial District that folded in 2008 due to rent increases, kiosks in Central Park and Times Square, and a curated shelf at Moynihan Train Hall.

Nancy Bass Wyden, Fred's daughter, started working at the store at sixteen, handling phone orders and managing the Central Park kiosks. After earning an MBA from the University of Wisconsin and a brief stint at Exxon, she returned to run the Strand. She became co-owner when her father retired in November 2017 and sole owner after his death in January 2018. In 2016, the New York Times called the Strand "the undisputed king of the city's independent bookstores." But independence comes with friction. When the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission moved to designate the building as a city landmark in 2018, Bass Wyden fought the designation, arguing it would impose regulatory burdens on renovations. "I'm not asking for money or a tax rebate," she said, contrasting her treatment with the city's courtship of Amazon HQ2. "Just leave me alone." The commission landmarked the building anyway in June 2019.

The COVID-19 pandemic hit the Strand hard. In March 2020, most of the workforce was laid off. The store received a Paycheck Protection Program loan between one and two million dollars, intended to preserve 212 jobs -- but 188 had already been eliminated. Fewer than two dozen union positions were restored. In October, Bass Wyden posted a plea on Twitter saying the Strand was in danger of closing. The response was extraordinary: 25,000 online orders poured in over the following weekend. But the plea also drew criticism from those who had followed the store's ongoing labor disputes, and Bass Wyden's purchase of Amazon stock -- tens of thousands of dollars' worth -- after publicly characterizing the company as an existential threat to her business only deepened the contradictions. The Strand survived, as it has survived everything since 1927, though the question of what survival costs and who bears that cost has grown harder to answer.

On December 22, 2021, Ben McFall died at home after a fall. He had worked at the Strand since 1978 -- the longest-tenured bookseller in the store's history. McFall held no management title, yet he was the only employee given personal control over an entire section (fiction) and the only one with a desk of his own. Bass Wyden called him "the heart of the Strand." His death captured something about the store that the eighteen-miles slogan does not: the Strand is not just inventory. It is the accumulation of decades of people who cared enough about books to take a quiz, pass it, and stay.