NEW YORK, July 17 — As Jennifer Lobaugh arrived at the Strand Book Store to apply for a job this spring, she remembered feeling jittery. It wasn’t only because she badly wanted a job at the fabled bookstore in Greenwich Village, her first in New York City, but also because at the end of the application, there was a quiz — a book quiz.
She rode the elevator to the third floor, sat down at a long table and scanned the quiz: a list of titles and a list of authors. She matched The Second Sex with Simone de Beauvoir right away. But then she had doubts. “I thought I would have no trouble,” said Lobaugh, 27, who has an MFA in creative writing and a background in French and Russian literature. “But I got nervous.”
The Strand is the undisputed king of the city’s independent bookstores, a giant in an ever-shrinking field. It moves 2.5 million books a year and has around 200 employees. While its competitors have closed by the dozens, it has survived on castaways — from publishers, reviewers, the public and even other booksellers.
For nearly a century, the huge downtown bookstore has symbolised not only inexpensive books, but something just as valuable: full-time work for those whose arcane knowledge outweighs their practical skills. “Ask Us,” says a big red sign on the walls of the Strand. The starting wage is US$10.50 (about RM41) an hour, with health benefits in 60 days and union representation. And there are unwritten perks, including discounts, a casual dress code and brushes with celebrity.
A job at the Strand has also offered generations of newcomers, like Lobaugh, originally of Ponca City, Oklahoma, something like instant New Yorker status. The Strand employees are known for being “curmudgeonly” but also clever, even cool: Former employees include Patti Smith and Luc Sante.
For about four decades, however, applicants have confronted a final hurdle to enter its ranks: the literary matching quiz.
There are tests for driver’s licenses and citizenship, for New York City landmarks preservationists and sanitation workers. But a quiz for an entry-level retail job at a bookstore?
“I’ve heard about this test,” said Kevin Cassem, who works at McNally Jackson, an independent bookstore. “It’s funny.”
At the Barnes & Noble at Union Square, an employee who said she was not authorised to give her name said, “No, there’s no test.” (A manager confirmed that.) Asked whether people with no literary knowledge could work at Barnes & Noble, as if it were a coffee shop chain, she said, “Unfortunately, yes.”
Over time, the reputation of the Strand’s quiz has grown; it has become as much a part of the store’s identity as its canvas tote bags. The legend has become larger, in fact, than the quiz itself, which is only 10 lines long, covering a few inches of the photocopied application.
“How long did it take? I probably agonised about it for five minutes,” said Lobaugh, wearing a flamingo-printed T-shirt and unpacking books on the main floor of the Strand on a recent Tuesday.
“But it probably took 90 seconds.”
Still, the stakes feel high. About 60 people apply for a job at the Strand every week; typically only a couple are hired.
The booksellers scuttling across the 10,000-square-foot main floor are not the only ones required to face the quiz. Members of the Books by the Foot team, which assembles collections for television and film sets, have to take it, too, as do new workers at the Strand satellite in a Club Monaco shop in the Flatiron district and the kiosks by Central Park and Times Square. Even to work at the warehouse, one must take the quiz.
Fred Bass, who with his daughter, Nancy Bass Wyden, owns the Strand, called the quiz “a very good way to find good employees,” regardless of their duties.
“Without good people,” Bass said, “you don’t have anything going.”
The Strand was founded in 1927 when Fred’s father, Benjamin Bass, a son of Lithuanian immigrants, became enamored of books during his lunch breaks from a fabric store job on Fourth Avenue, then known as Book Row, and decided to open his own bookstore.
The Strand moved to its current location, at Broadway and 12th Street, in 1957. A paper application appeared around 1965; the quiz was added in the 1970s. “I thought it was a quick way to find if somebody had any knowledge of books,” said Bass, who, at 88, still works at the store part time.
Bass had chosen masterworks, stretching back to Homer. “Modern, with classics,” he said recently, from behind the buying counter. “I would throw in a science thing, like Darwin. And then I did a sneaky thing. I made one not match. Gone With the Wind, and no Mitchell,” he said.
“It told me who was smart.”
Bass has forgotten precisely when he invented the quiz, but the second-longest-tenured employee, Ben McFall, 68, recalls taking it in 1978. McFall, known as the Oracle for his ability to divine the right book for customers, later helped write the quiz.
In recent years, much has changed at the Strand. The motto went from “8 miles of books” to “18 miles of books” after an expansion and remodelling in 2005. The store added miles of merchandise, too, from a Strand-branded hat line to Moleskine notebooks and Pocky snack sticks. Perhaps most significantly, for broiling employees, the place finally got central air-conditioning, also in 2005. (“I hated it,” Bass said.)
Over the years, the quiz has been one of the constants.
Laura Donovan, who is now a bookkeeper, worked as a cashier at the Strand in the early ‘90s and remembered the quiz, though she had all but forgotten the titles. “Some were softball,” said Donovan. “Who wrote Moby-Dick and so forth, and a few obscure ones.”
What she had recalled more vividly was “opening the store in the morning and we’d have all these people out there waiting for the US$1 books”; encountering a film crew shooting a scene for the 1993 film Six Degrees of Separation in the store; and making lifelong friends. “We were all close,” Donovan said.
Brendan Francis Newnam, co-host of the public radio show The Dinner Party Download, took the quiz during a summer break from college in the mid-90s. “I remember it being not incredibly hard,” he said.
He was hired. “My purview was the horoscope section,” he said. “Even though it was this low-level job, it had street cred. And it was, you know, magical. It was this cornucopia.”
The book buyers in the rear of the store also left an impression. They were “in a class above the plebeian booksellers,” Newnam said, adding, “They were rough, unsmiling and they took a perverse pleasure in rejecting people’s books.”
Among young summer employees, he recalled, “there was this camaraderie that we’re going to weather this very tough, very hot experience.” Working without air-conditioning? “That was the real test.”
For about three decades, Bass presided over the quiz, tweaking it now and then but not making significant changes. In 2005, a manager named Carson Moss took over hiring duties from Bass and his daughter. “I tried to modernise it and diversify it,” said Moss, who had studied English literature at the University of St Andrews in Scotland.
He kept the format — 10 book titles, 10 authors, one trick question — but The Stones of Venice was removed, replaced by the likes of White Teeth. Being and Nothingness vanished; The Tipping Point appeared. “You have to have titles that are well-read,” Moss said.
Moss updated the quiz about every three years. It became less male-dominated, less white, yet people would still write in the margins. “They would critique the quiz and say there are not enough women or writers of colour,” Moss said. (The Strand has made an effort to diversify its hires in recent years, after the same criticism was made of its staff.)
Recently, another manager, Constance Fox, took over hiring, and the quiz. Fox, who majored in English literature at San Francisco State University, has worked at the Strand for five years; she previously worked in customer service at the San Francisco Zoo.
Fox said it was “an interesting challenge” to represent the scope of authors, let alone all human knowledge, noting that the quiz focused on literature and “doesn’t cover all of the second floor” of the Strand — art, architecture, erotica and children’s books (which, it should be noted, are on opposite ends of the floor).
Despite its narrowness, she had not considered eliminating the quiz because “It’s a classic thing on the application.”
If the Strand’s literary quiz has been bound into its culture, so has finding ways to cheat on it.
Bass, the owner, told of a young man decades ago who had filled out the application. “And then he was running around the whole store,” Bass said. “He didn’t know any of those books. But he was bright enough to run around and ask the clerks and find the answers.”
He was hired.
In the late ‘80s, Daniel Krieger, now a freelance journalist (he occasionally contributes to The New York Times, among other publications), had just graduated from high school when he walked by the Strand, saw a sign that it was hiring and picked up an application.
He matched A Modest Proposal with Jonathan Swift, but was stumped by much of the quiz. “I was on my way to see a therapist and together we did it. He said, ‘Look, I don’t think you’re qualified for this job,’ but he gave me the answers to the ones I needed.”
Krieger soon found himself unpacking shipments in the storage area.
Once cellphones came along, applicants could text well-read friends. Katheryn McGaffigan, now working at a pharmaceuticals company, took the test while at a career crossroads a decade ago. “I studied English at Harvard Extension,” she said. “But I had to text a friend who was a philosophy major. I don’t retain book titles. He gave me four answers.”
McGaffigan worked at the Strand for about six months. Her most vivid memories were of the storage area, which she described as a “grass-roots tavern,” where employees, having proved their literary credentials, devoted themselves to “pounding whiskey and flirting with me.”
Today, would-be Strand employees can use their smartphones, searching for the authors of books in the quiz.
Applicants are on their honour to fill it out honestly, in a hushed corridor on the third floor, but “it’s not like the SAT,” said an employee, Valerie Miller, as she straightened the selection at the Central Park kiosk.
“You can have your phone out, because you need phone numbers and addresses for previous employers,” Miller said. “But I wouldn’t recommend it.”
“It makes it easier if you come in knowing the books,” she said.
How many accurate matches an applicant must make has always been a closely guarded secret. What is the minimum score to be hired?
Moss, the quiz innovator, would not say. He would only say that management takes the quiz “not very” seriously. “In a sense we feel it’s a reward for passionate readers, after they’ve slogged through an application,” he said.
Fox, the new quiz czar, said, “It’s the last thing I look at, to be frank.”
But that doesn’t mean the quiz is wholly unimportant at the Strand, or a mere nod to its history. Sometimes, Fox said, it can make all the difference.
“What I find most interesting is when people don’t answer, but then write: ‘I’m an artist. I know all about Picasso,’ or ‘Here’s what I know about children’s books.’”
She added, “It’s an interesting personality test.”
Strand Books has included a literary matching quiz in its job application form since the 1970s. Here are sample quizzes from years past. Match the author with the book title. Note: There’s one trick pair in each quiz. Can you spot them? (Red herrings noted at end.)
Quiz 1
Tool 1. The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
Ibsen 2. Animal Farm
Ellison 3. To the Lighthouse
Swift 4. A House for Mr Biswas
Gogol 5. Invisible Man
McCullers 6. A Confederacy of Dunces
Woolf 7. Dead Souls
Kundera 8. Waiting for Godot
Orwell 9. Gulliver’s Travels
Naipaul 10. The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Quiz 2
Atwood 1. White Noise
Kerouac 2. The Second Sex
Smith 3. Metamorphoses
Vonnegut 4. Kindred
Zinn 5. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
Delillo 6. A Handmaid’s Tale
Ovid 7. A People’s History of the United States
Gladwell 8. Naked Lunch
de Beauvoir 9. Slaughterhouse-Five
Butler 10. The Tipping Point
Here are the red herrings in the Strand matching quizzes. Give yourself extra credit if you came up with the correct authors. Quiz 1: Henrik Ibsen did not write “Waiting for Godot”; Samuel Beckett did. Quiz 2: Jack Kerouac did not write “Naked Lunch”; William Burroughs did. — The New York Times
