Books are Weapons

On Collecting

Style reveals the man. The building of a library is an act of style, an expression of what we are and a good measure of who we are. Collecting is an act of self-realization. One collects books and builds a library to create an intensified environment. It is a philosophical statement as this room is […]
From the Library of John Waters

Reading as a Pleasant Deviation: A Guided Tour of John Waters Library I was not a book fanatic until I was fifteen and discovered Genet and Burroughs and all these Grove Press books and thought, thank God, I’m not that abnormal. That opened up a whole new world to me. Those were my friends. Tennessee […]
From the Library of Albert Murray

That shelf is where my real stuff is. See it start with Joyce and come up to Hemingway, Faulkner and Fitzgerald. That’s it. That’s the contemporary literature I read. Those people in those books up there on the shelves provide a solid base to enable us to get to it all. There’s Mann’s Joseph and […]
Susanna Moore on the Book as Aphrodisiac

(photo: a gift from the author) My first acquaintance with Susanna just precedes the publication of her first novel, My Old Sweetheart, when we “met cute”. I was selling books at a carriage trade shop on the Upper East Side of Manhattan that several of her friends frequented; our bi-coastal movie clientele, it turned out, […]
From the Library of Alan Pryce-Jones

From my diary June 25, 1991 Mr. Pryce-Jones’s houses are on John Street in the heart of Old Newport. Three mid-Ninteenth Century saltboxes. His principle residence is at 46 where we found a note addressed to Mr. and Mrs. Thometz asking us to check in at #50. I hadn’t been prepared for a compound. The […]
Fran Lebowitz On Reading

As told to Kurt Thometz. I’m not a collector. I don’t care about things like that. I not a collector because I’m not that organized. I’m not grown-up enough to collect things, but I have acquired a stellar collection of odd books, weirdo books, books that don’t fit easily into categories. I have a very […]
From the Library of Diana Vreeland

“Let’s suppose you were a total stranger – and a very good friend. That’s a good combination. What would you want to know about me? And how would you go about finding it out? To me the books I’ve read are the gateway. My life has been more influenced by books than by any other […]
On Bibliophiles

Reading, the unpunished vice, promises, as most vices do, a finer world within the world. Beyond the narrow realm of our senses is the greater reality retained in and contained by that cumbersome and collectable commodity, the book. While all book collectors consider themselves bibliophiles, most bibliophiles perceive collecting as the precious sport of a […]
Chet Baker

Deep in a Dream By James Gavin As Though I Had Wings By Chet Baker At 3 a.m. on May 13, 1988, Chet Baker nodded out, threw himself out, or was thrown out of, a hotel room window in Amsterdam, quite as if he had wings. Long ago and far away, I dreamed a […]
Pimpnology

Pimpnology: Regarding Players, Hoes, Johns & The Life “Police, politicians, businessmen, lawyers, dope dealers, prostitutes, pimps – all are dependent on one another, yet all prey on one another. In modern urban life, none of us is immune to this kind of social network; the very life of the city is made up of such […]

Books Are Weapons - Blog Stream

Beyond the Door of No Return

David Diop. New York: FSG, 2023. The first 112 pages are very good but the 131 pages after that are the best fiction I’ve read in recent memory. Like nothing since Chatwin’s Viceroy of Ouidah and I’m in endless admiration of the author’s accomplishment. In gorgeous translation. A new book. I don’t sell new books […]

I Need A Dollar

Back in 2012, Kahlil Joseph asked if I’d sit in on this. 4:17 into it there we are in Jumel Terrace Books, which is still there but nobody else is. The shop is still there, open by appointment, but since 2015 it’s been mostly occupied by short-term rentals that mostly came through AirBnB, which has […]

A Harlem Poetry Lesson

Amanda Gorman Sees Us Learning to Love Through Loss | Glamour 2021 Woman of The Year. Glamour chose Jumel Terrace Books to showcase the poetess reading as well as their photo feature. A couple of nights later I watched Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy’s attempt to act out Dorothy Thompson and Sinclair Lewis’s relation in […]

The Nate Lacy All Stars with John Smith on guitar

Sept. 5th, 2020. New York is Not Dead. 3 to 7 pm, Library Park, 155th betw. St. Nick’s and Edgecombe. Harlem Late Night Jazz presents the house band at Lenox Lounge, St. Nick’s Pub, Showman’s and Ginny’s for your listening pleasure.