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Michael Seidenberg, Who Ran a Not-So-Secret Bookstore, Dies at 64

Michael Seidenberg in 2015 at his store, Brazenhead Books, which he ran out of an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. That year his landlord, saying the site was more store than apartment, began eviction proceedings.Credit...Yana Paskova for The New York Times

Michael Seidenberg, whose clandestine bookshop and literary salon on the Upper East Side was much loved by bibliophiles, literati and inveterate browsers, died on July 8 in a hospital in Danbury, Conn. He was 64.

His wife, Nicky Roe, said the cause was heart failure.

Mr. Seidenberg, who lived in Manhattan and in Kent, N.Y., ran Brazenhead Books, which was a storefront establishment when he started it in the late 1970s on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn. It remained so when he moved it to East 84th Street around 1980, but business wasn’t as brisk as he might have liked.

“One reason was that the entrance was a few steps below the sidewalk,” Mr. Seidenberg told The New Yorker in 2008, “and lots of people seem to have an aversion to walking down.”

When he lost his lease seven years later — the landlord wanted to put in a laundry, he said — he moved his vast inventory of used books, some of them first editions, autographed or otherwise noteworthy, to his rent-controlled apartment on the same block.

“It was an amount of books you wouldn’t necessarily want to live with,” he said, and he and his wife moved to an apartment nearby and left the place to the books, setting the stage for a quirky bit of New York history.

Mr. Seidenberg plied his trade at book fairs and on sidewalks for some years. But around 2008, with the help of George Bisacca, a conservator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, he turned the book-stuffed apartment into a secret bookstore, open at select times or by appointment to friends and admirers. Sometimes a visitor might actually buy a book, but the place was more like a salon, with literary figures and book lovers mingling and sharing a drink at a bar stocked mostly with liquor contributed by patrons.

Mr. Seidenberg thought it filled a niche.

“It’s a bigger thing than a bookstore — it’s a community of writers,” he told The New York Times in 2015. “Dylan Thomas is not drinking in the West Village anymore. Kerouac and the Beats are not hanging out. So this is a place people can come.”

Soon the covert bookstore/salon was not so covert; “every year, it got less and less secret,” Mr. Seidenberg acknowledged. It may have become too well known. In 2015 the landlord, saying the site was more store than apartment, began eviction proceedings.

The closing that year became somewhat circuslike, with lots of news coverage and curiosity seekers.

“By the end there were a lot of hangers-on who were there for booze and not for books,” Mr. Seidenberg told The Guardian. “The inner-circle people weren’t happy those last days.”

Mr. Seidenberg, though, didn’t stop selling books. The writer Jonathan Lethem, whose association with Mr. Seidenberg goes back to the days of the Brooklyn store, said some of the inventory was moved to the apartment where Mr. Seidenberg lived and some to his house upstate, and he went back to a by-appointment model.

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A literary gathering at Brazenhead Books in 2011. Sometimes a visitor might buy a book, but the place was more like a salon, where literary figures and book lovers mingled.Credit...Deidre Schoo for The New York Times

“After the publicity boom around the eviction,” Mr. Lethem said by email, “he never wanted to cut such a public profile again.”

As Mr. Seidenberg told The Guardian, “People found me before, and they will find me again.”

Michael Richard Seidenberg was born on July 22, 1954, in Brooklyn. His father, Sam, worked in the garment industry, and his mother, Dorothy Hara, was a bookkeeper.

He grew up in Brooklyn and, he said, was a bibliophile from an early age.

“I just loved books,” he said in a video made in conjunction with the article in The New Yorker. “Just driving around I would get excited whenever I would see a ‘B - O - O’ — and then all of a sudden it’s ‘BOOTS.’ And I’m, ‘Nooo.’ ”

When he first started as a book dealer in Brooklyn, it was one of several occupations; he “ran a bookshop, a puppet troupe and theater, and a moving company — all out of the same storefront,” as The New Yorker put it. As a teenager, Mr. Lethem came in and ended up working there.

“My brain is still shaped like the long list of books Michael told me to read,” he told Salon in 2015, “and which I took home instead of pay.”

The speakeasy bookstore (as news articles often called it) on East 84th Street was a place that, it was commonly said, you could go to for the first time only in the company of a regular. But the writer David Burr Gerrard, in a tribute to Mr. Seidenberg posted on lithub.com last week, said that wasn’t really true.

“Michael was, as he liked to say with his trademark this-should-be-obvious-but-nobody-thinks-of-it grin, ‘in the phone book,’ ” he wrote, “and would happily give his address to any stranger who called him.”

Mr. Gerrard, who was a frequent visitor, described the scene.

“Pulpy 1950s thrillers stood close to the front, as though to remind you not to get too self-serious in a place that also offered esoteric experimental literature that had been out of print for decades, books you never heard of until Michael put them in your hands and you wondered how you had ever lived without them,” he wrote. “The apartment was overstuffed, with books apparently strewn everywhere, and yet somehow their arrangement was so aesthetically gorgeous that, on my first visit and my fiftieth, I could hardly believe it was real.”

Mr. Seidenberg’s first marriage, to Thelma Woozley, ended in divorce. He and Ms. Roe had been together since 1980.

Mr. Seidenberg often described himself as a good book collector but a lousy bookseller. Money, though, did not seem to be all that important to him, perhaps in part because the place on 84th Street was rent-controlled. The Guardian, in its 2015 article, also mentioned a small inheritance that enabled him to buy the house upstate. He told Gothamist in 2015: “I luckily have enough money that I only need to make very little. So if I have a customer that picks up a $20 book and I know he’s a writer, the book is going to be $10.”

And so at least until things got too crazy amid the publicity over the eviction, he didn’t mind that a lot of his regular visitors weren’t really customers, but came by only to hang out; one young woman, he told Gothamist, stopped by once a month just to smoke pot.

“I love that,” he said. “To me, it’s a compliment above and beyond what I do with the books that I’ve created a zone where people can be themselves.”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section B, Page 10 of the New York edition with the headline: Michael Seidenberg, 64; Ran Not-So-Secret Bookstore. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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