Strand Book Store

The Strand has been selling books at the corner of Broadway and 12th Street since 1957 — and in the neighborhood since 1927, when it opened on Fourth Avenue's old Book Row. It is the row's last survivor, and it survived by getting enormous: the famous claim is eighteen miles of books, stacked through three floors of a building that smells faintly and permanently of paper. Red carts of dollar and five-dollar books line the sidewalk outside; inside, the aisles narrow as the shelves climb, and the staff recommendation cards are small essays in themselves.

The ground floor is the show — new fiction, the tote bags, the crowd — but the store rewards verticality. Art and photography books take over upstairs, and the third-floor Rare Book Room is a different world altogether: quieter, wood-shelved, with first editions behind glass and readings held among them most weeks. Between them runs one of the best used-book operations anywhere, where review copies of new hardcovers turn up at half price.

Budget more time than you think. The Strand is a browsing machine, built over nearly a century to make you miss your next appointment, and the dollar carts alone have started more personal libraries than most bookstores' whole inventories.