by Nathan Dixon
I began interning for Bomb Magazine in the summer of 2012, looking for a literary community in New York City after a year of slinging waffles from a food truck and writing an unreadable novel in the Starbucks on the corner of Astoria Place and Lafayette. My main task was to help digitize the magazine’s archive. Two days a week, I sat at a desktop computer surrounded by a team of fellow unpaid interns typing. In our “free time,” of which there was none, we were invited to peruse the slush pile, which in those dwindling analog days was still a literal stack of manuscripts slopped onto the floor of the office. This made us feel like we had some say in what was published, though ultimately, I doubt anything that we passed up the chain found its way into the magazine’s pages.
Did we slug down beers in downtown Brooklyn after work, yammering about our artistic projects and ambitions? I’m sure we did, but I don’t remember. What I do remember is an invitation from a previous-intern-turned-magazine-writer to a secret bookshop on the upper east side for what she called “a salon.” It would be in an apartment, she told us. Invitation only. We would have to be buzzed in. It wouldn’t begin until after 8 o’clock.
I biked to 235 East 84th street in the dark that night and convinced myself as I stood outside looking at the glass entryway sandwiched between a piano bar and a dry cleaner, that—alas!—I had been duped by the magazine’s staff into some type of hazing ritual. I buzzed #7 nonetheless, and though I want to remember there being some type of password, I think I just stuttered the word “Bomb” into the microphone before the door unlatched and I entered the building.
My memory of that night is fuzzy. In my otherwise empty backpack—a backpack meant for books I might buy—was a fifth of Jim Beam and two spliffs tucked into a pouch of Top tobacco. Up the stairs, the door to the apartment was closed, though it would stand wide open by the end of the night, jazz piano tumbling into the hallway.
Michael Seidenburg—the owner and proprietor of Brazenhead, this vagabond and illicit used bookstore—answered when I knocked and welcomed me into this dwelling-place-turned retreat-for-bibliophiles.
My name is Michael Seidenburg. I’m a bookseller. Brazen Head Books is my business.
The Brazen Head—made of brass or bronze—was a legendary magical automaton that could answer any question put to it by pilgrims and seekers. The wizards rumored to possess these objects during the early modern period, were in fact late medieval scholars. It is also the title of a book by:
John Cowper Powys, the British-Welsh writer, John Cowper Powys.
Michael Seidenburg’s favorite author.
Jamais Vu.
It is extremely difficult to describe the utter defamiliarization of walking into an apartment—that looks from the outside like any other apartment—and finding inside a used bookstore. I have seen a digital image of a sliced-opened apple manipulated to reveal the innards of an orange. An image that draws inspiration no doubt from the collages of the Dadaists and the unnerving, illogical scenes of the surrealists, whose own salons drifted from coffee shop to coffee shop through the streets of Zürich, Berlin, New York, and Paris in the aftermath of the first World War. But this image—an orange inside of an apple—doesn’t quite do the bookstore justice.
*
When I stepped inside, the space seemed at once to constrict with that claustrophobic feeling familiar to anyone who has ever walked into the home of a hoarder and simultaneously to grow exponentially with endless nooks and crannies where readers might tip precariously into other worlds.
Although Brazenhead Books was organized meticulously,
Alright, in the hall, in the dark, we have business, psychology, and sports.
it was nothing like a library. Neither an archive, nor a museum.
Over here, trade paperback, non-fiction.
The books were there for pulling off of the shelves that lined every inch of wall space.
Nonfiction hardcover. In the mysterious hidden closet are mysteries.
They were there for thumbing through, for getting lost within,
Here—
for purchasing and dogearing,
the fiction section, reading copies, drama.
for annotating endlessly.
Right below you,
Brazenhead was nothing if not a hands-on experience.
music section.
Michael gave me a brief tour upon my arrival.
And to your left, the art section. Here, of course, much smaller than the Renaissance, itself, is the Renaissance section.
The small rooms and hallways were used to separate sections carefully,
This is fiction—
and because there were far more books than could fit into the space,
half-price, paperback fiction.
there were stacks that sometimes reached from the floor to the ceiling.
So, I was buried in books. I would just add to the stacks. There were mountains, literally mountains of books here.
I had seen these stacks before. They stand like cairns, in the corners and atop the shelves of any good used bookstore.
Down here, some literary [unc.], trade paperbacks, and poetry. Right over here are mysteries, collectable mysteries,
And this is exactly what Brazehead was: a good used bookstore—
Science fiction, [unc.]—
with all the nostalgic and revolutionary connotations therein contained.
and art.
A good used bookstore in an age that seems to value such spaces less and less. When I returned home to North Carolina at the end of the summer, I witnessed in quick succession the shuttering of Nice Price Books in Durham and The Bookshop in Chapel Hill, two labyrinths in which I lost myself weekly during my undergraduate days.
I have heard someone say that Brazenhead was a noncommercial-commercial space,
Anti-commerical, commerical space.
and that seems a good way to describe every good used bookstore I have ever visited. They are not places for mass consumption, and even the selling of books often seems some sort of ruse, behind which the real work of connecting people and ideas goes on.
To the right are letters—books that no one really wants, but I like—some vintage paperbacks, some journals. In the glass case are some signed things.
Once inside, it would have been very easy to forget that this particular store was wedged into an apartment if not for Michael’s presence.
To the right of that is some Beat literature with some Vietnam on the bottom. To the right of that, humor, ’cause you need humor after that.
He held court from a throne through the night. A throne that was a desk overflowing with books. And because he was so willing to talk endlessly about everything, this noncommercial-commercial space became simultaneously a nonacademic academic space. This is exactly what I had hoped for when I first moved to New York more than a year before my visit, but as is often the case, I only began to find a sense of belonging on the eve of my departure.
After the tour, I poured myself a glass of Jim Beam, Michael poured himself a glass of Famous Grouse, and we talked about books until other people began arriving. I don’t remember exactly what he said, but instead the way in which he said it. Easy. Generous. Full to the brim of affable skepticism, packing his pipe and smiling to show off a missing incisor between his front tooth and his canine. It became clear as we talked, as my eyes adjusted to my surroundings, that he had carefully curated this anarchic space—filled to overflowing with books and the refuse of readers—over the course of his lifetime. The space was constructed in a devotional act. These books were lived-in-and-among. Touched by countless hands. Their pages, inscribed and filled with marginalia. The store was a wide-open space behind its thin veneer of secrecy. A space that quickly revealed itself to those who went looking for it. Yet a space, I suspect—like certain books—that promised a different reading every time one visited. An impossible space that was larger on the inside than it was on the outside like that famous dwelling in Danielewski’s House of Leaves.
When other people began arriving, I faded toward the walls to browse. Realizing—and not for the first time—how easy it is to eavesdrop when one’s nose is buried in a book.
I remember smoking cigarettes on a fire escape and listening to someone talk about James Baldwin and jazz as sirens sounded in the distance. I picked up a copy of Go Tell it on the Mountain that night and read it in central park the next weekend. I also found copies of Zora Neale Hurston’s Dust Tracks on the Road and Samuel Beckett’s Molloy, though it would take me longer to get around to those.
I remember Michael arguing with someone about how progressive Obama really was, the conversation edging toward apocalypse as the hours slipped away. I remember another of the Bomb interns showing me a first edition of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 that was priced at $2,500. Michael shrugged and laughed.
“It is what it is,” he said.
*
On the website that was created after Michael’s death, Brazenhead Books is described as “the little shop where time stood still.” But I only remember the hours flying away as the oracles sang down from their shelves, wishing that I could stay and browse and listen a little longer.
And these are just some interesting things, you know paper things, and then some proofs. And I’m sure there’s a section that’s gotten by us, but that’s the beauty of it. And of course, some vintage paperbacks. No bookshelf would be complete without something even older than [unc.]. Now, you guys know as much as I do. I think you got it, I’m sure I must have missed something but—.
Nathan Dixon is author of Radical Red (BOA Editions, 2025), which won the BOA Editions Short Fiction Prize. His creative and critical work has appeared in dozens of journals. He lives in Durham, NC, with his family and is an assistant professor of American literature at North Carolina Central University. He spends his time haunting the indefatigable independent bookstores of the Triangle: Letters, Golden Fig, The Fuzzy Needle, The Regulator, So&So, Reader’s Corner, Epilogue, and Flyleaf.
This piece was created while attending the Podcasting the Humanities Institute at the National Humanities Center.