How the Strand Lost Its Workers

The owner says the bookstore’s hanging by a thread—and staff say they’re the ones paying the price.

- Madison Malone Kircher

WHEN ROBYN SMITH started working as a bookseller at the Strand in 2019, she felt as though she’d found her people. She loved having coworkers who were almost too passionate about books. She loved how, when she later joined the events team, she got to pose questions to famous authors, like what animal they would ride into battle. (André Aciman opted for a chameleon.)

“I saw the Strand as a place of comfort within the city,” Smith says. “Being a part of that team is really special. I felt special coming to work every day.”

The Strand, with its flagship on Broadway at East 12th Street, is the city’s most iconic bookstore. For a certain kind of New Yorker, it’s an equally iconic place to work—one where job applicants have to take a literature quiz that involves matching book titles with their corresponding authors’ names to prove their chops. Luc Sante worked there. Patti Smith did too, for a hot minute. (She found it unfriendly.) Strand employees are expected to have opinions. One former manager, Theresa Buchheister, recounted what happened when a friend of hers asked a staffer for help finding a copy of John Updike’s collected