Speakeasies

Wanna Buy A Book?

by June 2, 2008

Michael Seidenberg has a beard with deckled edges, a boyish face with only minor wear, a spine in fine shape, a mint mind, and a Brooklyn provenance, circa early nineteen-fifties. He also has a used-book shop, but mum’s the word. Brazen Head Books, originally situated in Brooklyn and, later, on East Eighty-fourth Street in Manhattan, has just reëmerged (after a decade-long retirement) as a by-appointment-only concern, housed in an apartment whose address Seidenberg would just as soon keep secret.

One recent Sunday, several writers, a couple of filmmakers, a photographer, an art restorer, a scientist, and certain other personages gathered at this hideaway to celebrate—in a nonchalant sort of way—Brazen Head’s latest incarnation. They had been invited by the novelist Jonathan Lethem, who met Seidenberg about thirty years ago, when Lethem, then fourteen, worked at the Brooklyn shop, doing grunt work in exchange for books.

The guests, as per invitation, arrived at staggered intervals, for the not-Barnes-&-Noble-scale operation space—three cozy rooms and a closet-size nook—was hardly meant for crowds. Still, there was a remarkable abundance of books.

“Is this, like, the greatest garage sale of all time?” Vince Passaro, a novelist and essayist, said. Passaro was browsing in the middle room, where there is a section dedicated to the works of John Cowper Powys, one of Seidenberg’s favorites and the author of the 1956 novel “ The Brazen Head.” A brazen head, should you have forgotten your medieval history, is a brass head that was supposedly able to answer any question. The statue’s powers, Seidenberg explained, sitting at a big old desk, were dormant until an alchemical rite was performed, the last step of which required the involvement of a Hebrew virgin. “The reason we have so few brazen heads in contemporary times,” he theorized, “is that it’s hard to find a Hebrew virgin nowadays.”

In the back room, the writers Peter Straub, Sean Wilsey, and Nathan Englander were playing Name That Year—holding up collectible books and trying to guess the year of publication. They were also discussing why two similar-looking first editions of Marilynne Robinson’s “Housekeeping” were priced so differently. “Foxing,” Wilsey said, adding that that was the only biblio term he knew and he wanted to use it.

The buzzer seemed to be always buzzing, and Seidenberg to be always leading a guided tour and chronicling the history of Brazen Head to yet another newcomer. Briefly:

In the nineteen-seventies, Seidenberg ran a bookshop, a puppet troupe and theatre, and a moving company—all out of the same storefront. One day, he noticed a commercial rental on the Upper East Side and, on a whim, grabbed it, and decided to concentrate his business efforts on books. But the shop struggled.

“One reason was that the entrance was a few steps below the sidewalk, and lots of people seem to have an aversion to walking down,” he said. Seven years later, the rent quadrupled, and Seidenberg lost his lease. The contents of the store were relocated to his apartment, on the same block. “It was an amount of books you wouldn’t necessarily want to live with,” he said. So he and his wife left, and the literature stayed. Occasionally, Seidenberg would set up a booth at a book fair. He also peddled paperbacks on the street for a while, an experience that he found disheartening. Long stretches of staring at his books and wondering what to do with them followed. And then, last year, his friend George Bisacca, a conservator of paintings at the Metropolitan Museum, stepped in. Bisacca transformed the higgledy-piggledy storage space into the bookshop-in-an-apartment that it is today.

To say that Seidenberg’s shop is back in business is not quite accurate, for business was never his model. He envisions a hangout, where readers can relax in comfortable chairs with a favorite book. “I had this idea of telling customers they couldn’t buy anything the first time they came,” he said, “so that they’d believe me when I say nobody is obliged to buy anything.” His wife nixed that idea.

That first Sunday evening, Seidenberg estimated that he grossed about nine hundred dollars, on purchases that ranged from two dollars to two hundred. He was very pleased, and it moved him to relate a story from the dark period, not too long ago, when he was selling books on the street. “Once, a couple stopped,” he recalled. “And the man asked his girlfriend, ‘Do you want a book?’ She said, ‘No, I already have a book.’ ” 

ILLUSTRATION: Tom Bachtell
You might like
   
To get more of The New Yorker's signature mix of politics, culture and the arts: Subscribe Now
Subscribe to The New Yorker
  • This Week: Links to articles and Web-only features in your inbox every Monday.
  • Cartoons: A weekly note from the New Yorker's cartoon editor.
  • Daily: What's new today on newyorker.com.
  • Receive all the latest fake news from The Borowitz Report.
I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its User Agreement, and Privacy Policy.
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/2008/06/02/080602ta_talk_marx
www.newyorker.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2013-20
114111
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:FWEM3D5LYO3653QYJQIMGF7CWRZ7UE6C
<urn:uuid:8f787223-f51d-4acb-8447-1532ebeee86d>
2013-05-19T10:05:14Z
165.254.27.113
sha1:UIIC3YOIQRWPGMX67SVE5COHOYXTYHFX
<urn:uuid:e575ff9f-5117-48f4-9488-35da3b8b64f8>
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/2008/06/02/080602ta_talk_marx
response
<urn:uuid:54355674-5864-4d8e-ae97-e1a949375203>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2013-20
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web with URLs provided by Blekko for Spring 2013
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf