I suppose it’s O.K. to give away the address now. The books are gone, packed up in dozens of cardboard boxes and hauled away. When you ring the buzzer for apartment No. 7, nothing happens any longer, and won’t, probably, until someone else moves in. The old feeling you’d get, that you had sprung a trapdoor, discovered a secret passage, won’t come anymore.
Michael Seidenberg’s one-of-a-kind bookshop, Brazenhead Books, closed last month. For seven years, it operated out of an apartment at 235 East Eighty-fourth Street. Of course no bookstore or other business had any business being there, in that rent-stabilized apartment, so it was, strictly speaking, illegal, and because it was illegal it had to be secret. The secret was known to a small number of discreet patrons and shared strictly by word of mouth. (At first, Michael saw customers by appointment only.) Inside, the windows were blacked out and covered with shelves. On bookcases, in every room, volumes of all sizes in serried ranks rose two deep from floor to ceiling. More were stacked on desks and tables and grew in unsteady columns from the floor. There was a stereo (covered in books), a few chairs, and a large desk in the front room (likewise all but submerged), on which Michael kept a half dozen or so bottles of wine and spirits, a tower of plastic cups, and a bucket of ice.
Walking in, you might find a handful of patrons lounging on chairs with drinks in their hands, or browsing amiably, making conversation, generally about books, but often ranging widely into art, politics, personal life stories, and the history of New York. In the same way that children imagine adults living in perfect freedom, enjoying all the cookies and television they want and staying up till all hours, Michael’s shop was what a bookish child might dream up as a fantasy home for himself, a place far from any responsibilities, where he would never run out of stories.
It was, of course, no more practical than a gingerbread house. There was no bathroom or kitchen. (When nature called, customers had to knock on the next-door neighbor’s apartment and ask to be let in.) The affable if somewhat inscrutable proprietor, potbellied and gray-bearded, in his late fifties, lived elsewhere, and held court in the shop on Saturday nights. At least, that was how things stood in the summer of 2011, when I first started visiting.
The story of Brazenhead goes like this: in the nineteen-seventies, Michael ran a bookstore in Brooklyn. That was the first Brazenhead Books. The novelist Jonathan Lethem, as Patricia Marx reported in Talk of the Town, in 2008, worked there when he was fourteen years old. (He was paid with books.) Michael eventually moved his shop to the Upper East Side, only to lose his lease several years later when the rent quadrupled. Lacking options, he moved the books into his own apartment, but there were too many—so many that he and his wife moved out to make room for them all. After that, he plied his trade occasionally, and more or less thanklessly, at book fairs and on city streets. Otherwise, in the apartment on East Eighty-fourth Street, the books gathered dust. It was not until 2007 that his friend George Bisacca, a longtime conservator of paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, helped Michael turn the apartment into the place I came to know. The Times, writing about Brazenhead in the fall of 2011, was near the mark in calling it a “literary speakeasy.”
In the years after I discovered the shop, I occasionally introduced others to it, bringing them with me one at a time, as if inducting them into a secret society. With time came practical improvements: the addition of a working toilet (but no sink), better-organized collections of Russian, Japanese, and Latin American literature. Michael even hired an assistant. As a result, the contents of the shop, formerly in a state of apparent chaos, began to assume a peculiarly perfect kind of order.
But the unlikeliness of the place never dissipated. On one of my first visits, Michael and I bonded over a shared fascination with the work of Edward Whittemore, an unjustly neglected American writer who, after graduating from Yale, in 1955, served in the Marines and as a C.I.A. operative in the Far East and Jerusalem. The first of his books, “Quin’s Shanghai Circus,” was published by Henry Holt, in 1974, and was described in the Times as “a war novel without the usual furniture of war,” “peopled with circus masters, prostitutes, priests, gangsters, voyeurs, retarded man-boys, pornography collectors, pederasts, dwarfs, fat American giants and sadfaced secret-service agents, who change identities from time to time and drift through landscapes that resemble Tokyo, Shanghai and the Bronx.”
There was a copy of the novel on a low shelf in Brazenhead’s back room, the first-edition room. Beside it were the hardcover volumes of Whittemore's magnum opus, the Jerusalem Quartet, all long out of print, which stand in relation to “Quin’s” much as “The Lord of the Rings” stands to “The Hobbit.” (Paperback reissues of the five novels, published by Old Earth Books, in 2002, are likewise out of print.) Frustratingly, though, Brazenhead had only books two, three, and four of the quartet; the first volume, “Sinai Tapestry,” was missing. I bought “Quin’s,” and asked after “Sinai Tapestry.” Michael indicated that it was in his private collection, and not for sale.
If it seemed strange for a bookseller not to sell a particular book, it was stranger still to let people treat his shop as a hangout without pressuring them to buy anything. His patrons, a mix of bright young things and old eccentrics, were fiercely loyal. The considerate ones bought books, or at least brought a handle of booze once in a while to replenish the bar. The inconsiderate treated Brazenhead like their own parlor—drinking up the whiskey and port, blocking the doorways, rarely buying anything. On any given night you were liable to encounter a poetry reading or a musical performance. For a time, on Thursday nights, the bookshop hosted weekly meetings of the staff of the New Inquiry, the lefty Web magazine, until Michael had what he described as a falling-out with the editors. From then on, Thursday was an open salon night, just like Saturday.
But for me, the books were always the biggest draw. Michael’s collection seemed incomparable in both its idiosyncrasy and its quality. There was a wall of poetry, another of science fiction. A special New York section. General fiction and literature were organized alphabetically, more or less, and stretched across several bookcases. Pulp novels higgledy-piggledy in one corner; art books enshrined in another nook; a few shelves reserved for the collected letters and journals of Edith Wharton, Hart Crane, James Joyce, and their peers. There were trashy paperbacks and American first editions of Yukio Mishima. One night, one of the New Inquiry editors and I gave an impromptu reading of a poem by Suzanne Somers—that Suzanne Somers—from a collection called “Touch Me,” a slim volume I was half-convinced Michael had somehow dreamed into existence. The poem was called “I Want to Be a Little Girl,” and was even more unsettling than it sounds. When I’d looked inside the front flap to see Michael’s asking price, there was no dollar figure, just one word, in pencil: “Priceless.”
When the notice of eviction came down, in the summer of 2014, the whole dynamic changed. All at once, Brazenhead was on borrowed time. No one knew how much. Patrons began to be looser with the address. There was a rumor that someone’s posting of the address online—a big no-no—had attracted crowds finally too large to ignore, and that this was what had occasioned the eviction notice.
As word got around, the crowds swelled. Minor celebrities dropped in. Everywhere you looked, on a Saturday night, you saw people guzzling red wine and Wild Turkey. Pot smoke was general, and it became hard to see the books through the throng. Michael and his shop were featured in the oddball web series “The Impossibilities.” He officiated at least one wedding on the premises.
Each supposed last night gave way to another. Nobody wanted to say goodbye. On July 28th, Michael advertised a final poetry reading—“apocalypse edition”—on Facebook. “See you there or on the other side,” he wrote.
Where will that other side be? Michael does plan to reopen somewhere, somehow. “The future will begin in September,” he told me recently. I don’t know whether he has chosen a location, or whether the store will retain its semi-clandestine nature. When I pressed him, he said only that he was off to the country to relax, and would be “back in September for Brazenhead—whatever that will be.”
