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

Kurt Thometz’s Little Black Bookstore by Orestis Tsonopoulos

Kurt Thometz, a private librarian to the ultra-rich and a rare book collector with an affinity for African literature, surrounds himself with more than 15,000 obsessively organized books in an 1891 brownstone on West 160th Street in Upper Manhattan. Part-bookstore, part-bed and breakfast and private library, Thometz’s home is situated in a neighborhood steeped in African […]

Harlem, a poetry lesson: By Nokia Lumia 1020 #NokiaWeberBailey from Nokia HD on Vimeo.

Harlem, a Poetry Lesson.

Featuring Jumel Terrace Books and The Private Library. Bruce Weber’s been supportive of the shop for several years now. Asked about his favorite haunts for the book My City, My New York he talked about our walks around Harlem. Last January, a shoot he did on location here appeared in German Vogue called All That […]

10 books on Art

There is nothing wrong with lists of 10 so long as they are disassociated with being the BEST of anything. I may get more requests than most for 10 Best Books, with admonitions NOT to think about it, from the inquiring minds of the internets, where a Zen-like preoccupation with the doctrine […]

Charles Fortner’s Return to his Native Land: Treme.

A year ago our friend Charles Fortner, of the 6th Ward in New Orleans, was felled by a stroke. An authority on local cuisine, it was something of an occupational hazard. Having just returned from five days dining with Covington’s own Camilla, Charles and another of Treme’s highly esteemed connoisseurs, Lolis Edward Elie, I can […]