Words Behind Closed Doors

Brazenhead Books: A peek into a secret bookstore.

There are few places where you can spend Saturday evenings with strangers, discussing literature over a glass of whiskey and getting lost in novels you never knew existed. In the secret bookstore of a converted Upper East side apartment however, Michael Seidenberg is doing just that.

Visitors are greeted by the owner, a stout, bearded man, with a warm aura and a charmingly thick Brooklyn accent. While he stands behind his makeshift bar, offering wine and liquor to his visitors, he converses with his customers while jazz music plays about rare novels. Conversations range between the future of poetry to bad adaptations of novels. The smell of must and pipe tobacco linger throughout the cozy apartment.

It takes a great deal of  research and inquiry to be invited into this unconventional storefront. To enter, you must request access into this modest man’s home and bookstore. After six years in this obscure location, Brazenhead Books has kept its air of intimacy. Seidenberg prefers to remain anonymous, rarely divulging his name to news sources. For the most part, news of “secret bookstore” has spread by word of mouth, for both practical and legal purposes. The owner wants it this way, and the law wouldn’t allow it any other.

With a write up in The New Yorker in 2008, and a recent video published by Etsy, Brazenhead Books has lost a great deal of its anonymity. Since Seidenberg has now been published in these news sources, it has also given his store a new level of accessibility. Customers contact Seidenberg through Facebook, e-mail, or at times showing up and buzzing his apartment. He has to maintain a sense of good judgment when allowing strangers into his home, especially as the bookstore’s hours are in the evening — Thursday after 8 p.m. and Saturday after 9 p.m.

Seidenberg explained that his five year career as a puppeteer in the seventies launched this bookstore project. The original Brazenhead Books was in downtown Brooklyn, functioning both as a bookstore and puppet theater which he co-managed with writer Jonathan Lethem. A few years after, he opened the second shop in Manhattan where Brazenhead operated for seven years until the landlord forced him out, converting Brazenhead’s space into a laundromat.

With rent too high to purchase another Manhattan storefront, Brazenhead’s books were consigned to the owner’s apartment. Instead of the books finding a new home, he and his wife found one instead, a few blocks away from the converted bookstore. Though the owner had never planned on running a bookstore out of his own home, he is content with this unconventional lifestyle.

“Oh I think I got really lucky. I live a perfect life,” Seidenberg said. “You know, I really couldn’t think of a better way to be selling books.”

Reporting by: Michele Berry