Fred Bass, Who Made Strand Bookstore a Mecca, Dies at 89 - The New York Times

Fred Bass, Who Made Strand Bookstore a Mecca, Dies at 89 - The New York Times

'Following his father's playbook, he pursued a policy of aggressive acquisition.

'"At first I used to think he was crazy," Mr. Bass told the cable news channel NY1 in 2015. "Why are we buying extra books? We haven't sold all these. But we just kept buying and buying. It was a fact -- you can't sell a book you don't have."

'The 70,000 books in the Fourth Avenue store swelled, at the Broadway site, to half a million by the mid-1960s and 2.5 million by the 1990s, requiring the purchase of a storage warehouse in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. By the time Mr. Bass bought the building for $8.2 million in 1997, the Strand had become the largest used-book store in the world.'"