In-the-know New Yorkers bid adieu to clandestine bookstore

"You can't judge a book by its cover." 

That could've been inscribed beside the buzzer for Apartment 7, 235 East Eighty-fourth Street in New York City. Except that might've given away the secret of what lay behind the door of the otherwise inconspicuous walk-up: a clandestine -- and somewhat illegal -- bookstore.

For seven years, Brazenhead Books attracted customers solely by word-of-mouth. And the few patrons who frequented it passionately guarded any and all knowledge of its existence.

Patrons like Brian Patrick Eha, whose article on the closing of Brazenhead Books currently appears on the New Yorker website. He discovered the shop when he was a student at Columbia University.

"I heard about it through a fellow classmate or maybe I saw it online. But I made it my mission to discover the address and figure out how I could get in there," Eha tells As it Happens guest host Peter Armstrong.

Once he had the address and the apartment number, and knew which button on the buzzer to press, he was in like Flynn. Or pretty much anyway. He still would've been carefully sized up by Brazenhead's owner, Michael Seidenberg. 

"Michael had a great memory for faces. If you were a first-timer, he would recognize that and maybe feel you out a little bit."

Once inside, he recalls, "you went up to the second floor, and at the end of this narrow, cramped hallway was this little door, with another door catty-corner to it for the next-door neighbour's apartment -- which is where initially we had to use the bathroom because there was no bathroom in the actual apartment housing Brazenhead."

There was hardly the room, with books lining the walls from floor to ceiling and stacked in "stalagmite" piles on the floor -- not to mention the fully-stocked bar and the adjoining smokers' lounge/make-out room. 

Given all the books and free booze on offer, it's unclear even to Eha how Seidenberg managed to keep his "literary speakeasy" afloat for so long.

"It was a cash business, so that avoids certain problems that might otherwise cut into your profit margin. I don't think he had any expenses. He'd owned the place since 1977. It was rent stabilized, and he . . . I dunno, I guess he made enough to keep the lights on at least and keep the bar stocked, with the help of his patrons."

Brazenhead hosted readings, concerts and at least one wedding. But it was the eclectic collection of rare books on offer that kept Eha going back.

"One of my prize finds that's now in my collection is a book called Genoa, written by Paul Metcalf, grandson of Herman Melville -- y'know the whale guy. It was published in 1965 by this poet in San Francisco named Jonathan Williams, who had a very small press at the time and put out incredibly loving, well-crafted editions of works of genius that were doomed to have in their own day an infinitesimally small audience. This is a first edition, which is really the only edition of this book."

Eha holds some hope that Seidenberg will revive Brazenhead in some form or the other in the future. But no matter what the future brings, for him the closing of its Upper Eastside apartment incarnation represents the end of an era.

"It was Aladdin's Cave," he says. "Really."