Strand Bookstore repays nearly 1.5 million dollars in pandemic loans

The Strand Bookstore, the Manhattan institution whose '18 Miles of Books' have appeared in everything from Sex and the City to Six Degrees of Separation, will repay nearly $1.5 million after improperly receiving a pandemic-era federal loan, the U.S. Department of Justice announced. The bookstore was ineligible for the money because its owner, Nancy Bass Wyden, is the wife of U.S. Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat.

The Paycheck Protection Program's second-draw loans required applicants to certify that no member of Congress held a direct or indirect controlling interest in the business. The Strand applied for a second loan of $932,350 in 2021; its first loan, taken in 2020, carried no such requirement. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro said in a statement that the program 'was created to save American jobs, not to enrich those who aren't eligible for taxpayer-funded relief, especially the wife of a U.S. Senator.'

Bass Wyden, whose grandfather founded the shop in 1927, said the regulations 'were changing rapidly' during the pandemic and that the bookstore was unaware of the eligibility changes between the first and second applications. She called the mistake unintentional and said the funds were returned as soon as the issue surfaced. A spokesperson for Senator Wyden said the couple do not discuss her business and that he had no involvement in the loan or the settlement.

The case is a rare act of repayment in a program that dispensed hundreds of billions of dollars with minimal upfront verification. Most PPP loans were forgiven outright, and enforcement has focused on a subset of cases where a paper trail made recovery straightforward. The Strand's own history illustrates the program's contradictions: Bass Wyden furloughed 188 of 217 employees when lockdowns began in March 2020, publicly described the loan as the thing that kept the store afloat for eight months, and drew criticism from her workers' union after buying at least $115,000 of Amazon stock during the same period.

The settlement lands on a bookstore rather than a lender, a franchise chain, or any of the intermediary institutions that structured the program's terms. When Congress writes rules that change between rounds and relies on borrowers to self-certify compliance, the liability settles wherever the paperwork is cleanest to challenge — in this case, on a family business whose owner married a senator.

The Strand will keep selling used paperbacks and rare first editions. The Justice Department keeps the distinction of having recovered improper money from a bookstore while the program's larger failures remain unrecovered.