Brazenhead Books, an illegal, secret bookstore that operated in New York for seven years, closed last month according to the New Yorker.

Michael Seidenberg’s speakeasy bookstore and literary salon had operated out of an apartment at 235 East 84th Street. The windows were blacked out, and inside, discreet patrons frequented the shelves and tall stacks of books.

New Yorker writer Brian Patrick Eha, who patronized the bookstore, called the collection of books “incomparable in both its idiosyncrasy and its quality”:

There was a wall of poetry, another of science fiction. A special New York section. General fiction and literature were organized alphabetically, more or less, and stretched across several bookcases. Pulp novels higgledy-piggledy in one corner; art books enshrined in another nook; a few shelves reserved for the collected letters and journals of Edith Wharton, Hart Crane, James Joyce, and their peers. There were trashy paperbacks and American first editions of Yukio Mishima.

Seidenberg had apparently run the first Brazenhead Books in the 1970s, as a conventional bookstore in Brooklyn, but after moving his shop to the Upper East Side, the rent quadrupled, leaving him with little choice but to store his books in an apartment. After years of selling books at fairs and on the streets, Seidenberg’s friend George Bisacca, a conservator of paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, transformed the place into a bookshop in 2007. The rest is history.

Seidenberg intends to reopen his bookstore somewhere else, at some point. “The future will begin in September,” he told Eha, without further clarification.

Filmmaker Andrew David Watson has made a documentary about the bookstore.

Photo credit: Jane Hanstein Cunniffe, Flickr.