When I was in my twenties, I went often to the Strand Bookstore, less to buy books than to discover them: the hardcover by an author I’d read about but never read; the tattered, out-of-print paperback that had been mentioned, obscurely, somewhere. The idea was to change my life. I spent hours on these treasure hunts, somehow made sweeter by the inhospitable setting: the grimy floor and high, cramped shelves, the narrow, dark aisles that required you to turn sideways and inhale when another browser needed to pass by. And then there was the staff, who responded to flubbed title requests the way I imagined Parisian waiters might respond to mispronounced orders.

I have continued to visit the Strand, and I have continued to think of it as a place you can get lost in. Until a few weeks ago, that is, when, wandering to the back of the first floor, I found myself in what looked more like an IKEA showroom than the ragged used bookstore of my youth.

“My daughter is doing it,” Fred Bass explained. Bass is eighty-seven and co-owns the Strand with his daughter, Nancy Bass Wyden. He was talking about the “opening up” or “deshelving,” the most recent of many waves of modernization that have taken place at the store since 2001, when the family bought the building that the store occupies, at 828 Broadway.

The Strand, which claims to hold eighteen miles of books, was started by Bass’s father, in 1927, on the stretch of Fourth Avenue known as Booksellers Row. In 1957, Bass moved the store to its current location, at Broadway and Twelfth Street. Bass Wyden has worked there since she was sixteen, with a brief stint working at Exxon as a business consultant.

Concerned with the persistent competition from online booksellers and chain stores, the Strand recently hired a design company to advise them as to “what customers want now and in the future,” Eddie Sutton, the store’s manager, who has been there since 1991, said. What many customers want turns out to be the convenience and variety found online. And so the Strand traded the bag check for video cameras and plainclothes security. The book-buying counter was moved from the front to the back of the store. The leather-bound sets (Will and Ariel Durant, the complete works of Dickens, Toynbee) behind the cashier were pushed aside to fit books arranged by the color of their spines. The non-book section was expanded to sell socks, lollipops, and greeting cards alongside T-shirts, refrigerator magnets, and totes bearing slogans like “Prose Before Hoes.” You can now mail letters from inside the store.

Asked where getting lost fit into the carnival, Sutton referred to “a kind of customer” who, he said, had less time for that these days than in the past. Besides, putting the inventory online, which the Strand did in 1997, already made getting lost the way I used to do less likely.

There are now two well-signed information desks on the first floor. When you ask for a book, a sales clerk prints out a bar-coded label and directs you to the information desk nearest the section where it might be. There, a second clerk can help you find the book on the shelf. Sutton said that computerizing the book-finding process had an unexpected effect: it made employees friendlier. “When you can’t give an answer, it’s hard to be nice,” he said, referring to the days when mispronouncing “Les Fleurs du Mal” or Sartre might elicit a snarl.

One day, I stood by the information desk near the new tables, testing his theory. Questions were asked and answered about where to find L. Frank Baum’s “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,” Jon Ronson’s “The Psychopath Test,” Boswell’s “Life of Johnson.” Everyone was polite and sounded happy to be talking about books.

The big change, completed three weeks ago, was the deshelving, which replaced twenty-two shelving units from the back of the first floor with nine modular tables. (A shelving unit comprises nine or ten bookshelves.) The new open area is four hundred and forty square feet, roughly the size of a studio apartment.

Bass Wyden said that she was inspired to deshelve after creating the store’s first “heat map.” In her office, she showed me the color-coded map—green for high-performing sections, yellow for mediocre performance, and red for low-performing ones, such as “Judaica” and “journalism.” The tables contain half as many books as the shelves but sell twice as many, she said, later adding that, while some people like getting lost in the stacks, for others, buying from tables was “more joyous.”

Because used books are displayed only on shelves—the tables display remainders and new titles—a number of used books had to be “culled.” Deshelving also meant moving the music, dance, and Americana sections to the basement. The Americana section, “held a thirty-per-cent-off sale and sold many hundreds of books,” Sutton said, adding that it was worth it. “I’m shocked at how good it looks,” he said.

The tables full of shiny paperbacks were indeed gorgeous. Some customers lingered for a while, picking up and putting down titles as if fondling fruit at a grocery store. Others circumnavigated, avoiding other browsers by a wide berth that was impossible in the shelves.

Next to the “Summer Reading” table (“The Stepford Wives,” Rudyard Kipling, Blaise Cendrars) stood Chloe Giroux, age eighteen. Giroux is studying illustration. She said she liked seeing the books laid out on the tables, “because it is visual.” She didn’t seem lost at all.