Tuesday, July 16, 2019

Michael Seidenberg (1954–2019)

Michael Seidenberg was the proprietor of Brazenhead Books, a bookstore with several incarnations, the most famous of which was a Manhattan apartment. I read of Michael’s death in Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York. The New York Times finally has an obituary. An excerpt:

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.”
It’s true. Elaine and I visited in 2012, after I looked up the number online and called. We found, among other things, three books by Alexander King, the first husband of our friend Margie King Barab. Talk about serendipity.

Related viewing
Brazenhead C’est Moi (A six-minute film)
There’s No Place Like Here: Brazenhead Books (A three-minute film)

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