From the Ashes to the Dustbin: The Making and Un-Making of a Personal Library

Illustration by Aurélie Bernard Wortsman

The floor is stacked with heaps of papers, drafts of abandoned manuscripts, works in progress, old love letters that outlived the involvement. The walls are covered with the bracketed bookshelves my brother put up when I first moved in. I myself fetched the wooden planks from a now boarded-up lumber yard on Spring Street in Soho. The shelves hold my library, amassed over the years, several hundred books, some bought, some gifted, some with singed covers and blackened edges, or coverless, damaged but still readable, retrieved from a dumpster parked outside the legendary Eighth Street Bookshop located down the block, the day after the fire. Each tome a mummy of memory, it is heartbreaking to have to separate those to keep from those to give (or, if no one wants them) throw away. But select I must. 

At age 72, I am considerably less agile than I was when I first moved in in 1976. Parkinson’s disease and severe neuropathy have given my legs an uncertain gait; chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy has weakened the grip of my afflicted hands on an ever-wobblier banister; no longer able to tackle the steep, rickety steps to get to my garret, I decided with a heavy heart to relinquish the lease.

Each tome a mummy of memory, it is heartbreaking to have to separate those to keep from those to give (or, if no one wants them) throw away. But select I must.

One friend took to calling the place my “honeycomb hideout.” 

A publisher who once dropped by presumed with a wink that I used it for secret romantic assignations. 

The only secret trysts I have ever sought out here were intimate tête-à-têtes with my revered literary forbears, Homer, Dante, Poe, Kafka, Borges, Bowles, Lispector et al, savoring their pickled words pressed between the covers of a book.

This fourth-floor walk-up studio in Greenwich Village, is, or rather was, for almost half a century (1976-2025) my rent-stabilized safe haven, for which, my grown-up children find it hard to believe, I started out paying a mere $165 in monthly rent. For more than two thirds of my life to date, I sat before a succession of inscription tools and devices: a favorite fountain pen, a battered green Olivetti portable typewriter, a Smith Corona electric, and ever more powerful desktop computers, at a table facing north, at the back of the building overlooking a quiet courtyard, trying to make sense of it all. 

For a scriptomaniac and avowed word fetishist like myself, to part with a book or a single scrap of scribbled-up paper is akin to flaying the skin on my right hand. And the very thought of chucking a book into the garbage simply because of its unsightly cover, or lack thereof, is a cardinal sin. But the place must be vacated by the end of the month, and I must decide which pages to dispatch to the library that collects my literary papers, and which to discard. But what in heaven’s name am I to do with all those beat-up books? No library or second-hand dealer would consider accepting them in such a sorry state.

*

Eighth Street, in Greenwich Village, runs East-West, between Sixth and Third Avenue, where it shifts name and gear to become the frenzied hotspot, Saint Mark’s Place, before going underground at the sloppy green expanse of Tompkins Square Park, before resuming its route from Avenue B to Avenue D. In 1976, when I moved into a fourth-floor walk-up garret apartment on the block between Sixth Avenue and MacDougal, the street, dubbed Book Row, boasted a plethora of bookstores, including St. Marks Bookshop at 13 St. Marks Place, B. Dalton’s, at the corner of Eighth and Sixth, Book Masters, at 60 E. Eighth St., Marboro Books, at 56 W. Eighth St., and the Eighth Street Bookshop, at 17 W. Eighth St. 

Among the proudest moments in my life was when a book of mine made it into the show window of the Eighth Street Bookshop. It felt like I had finally arrived. That same day I found a hundred-dollar bill lying on the sidewalk, and traded it in for the two-volume, compact edition of the Oxford English Dictionary that comes with a magnifying glass.

*

That store, my go-to book haven, went up in flames in 1979.

A day or two after the fire, I happened to be passing when the demolition crew got around to clearing away the debris.

“Watch it, sonny!” one of the helmeted men muttered, pushing past me a wheelbarrow full of burnt books and broken glass. He dumped the contents into a huge metal garbage container parked just off the curb, whereupon they broke for the day.

Seconds later I was up over the edge of that great book coffin, as happy as a boy in a mud puddle, getting litera(aril)ly filthy among burnt books.

I stumbled over jagged sheet metal, former shelves and partitions, amid a hodgepodge of poetry and pornography: Sanskrit erotic verse, Fanny Hill, and Homer. Most of the books were singed but readable, with titles outlined in charcoal and price conveniently obliterated. They cost nothing more than the effort to dig them out.

Jim, an NYU philosophy grad student who happened by, joined me, and together we set about systematically strip-mining the bin.

“Kant here!” I yelled and flung Pure Reason at him.

“You want Williams?” he asked.

“Tennessee or William C.?” I asked back. I love them both.

In the beginning we mercifully glanced at unknowns. But sweat and greed made us choosy. And the obscure poets and thinkers went flying back into oblivion.

For a scriptomaniac and avowed word fetishist like myself, to part with a book or a single scrap of scribbled-up paper is akin to flaying the skin on my right hand.

When a wall of psychology threatened to cave in on us, we reluctantly deserted the French Surrealists. Breton and Aragon, alas, got buried under Freud and Jung.

“I can tell there are a couple of real book lovers here,” said a well-dressed, straw-hatted, old collector with a gracious smile and a limp. We helped him climb into the bin. He picked out a few novels and The Whole Sex Catalogue, “for a friend,” he insisted with a wink, and dropped them into his straw basket. “Always find the best things in the trash,” he winked again, climbed back out and rode off on his bicycle.

“Any occult?” a woman called to us from the sidewalk.

“Come in and look for yourself!” I beckoned.

The passersby got wise. By sundown the bin was as crowded as any book store, with browsers demanding: “Where’s yoga?” or “What happened to the art books?”

I loaded my haul into a one-wheeled shopping cart I found lying about and dragged the load back to my place. 

A little girl stopped me on the way.

“What’re you gonna do with all those books?” she asked.

“Read them,” I said.

So, The City swallows up its treasure. Life goes on.  

After the fire, wooden planks replaced the once book-laden window display. Overnight the new wooden wall was covered with posters announcing upcoming events. The events took place. They too were forgotten.

The bookshop was subsequently replaced, first by a record shop, thereafter by an urban outlet for cowboy boots and Western wear, and currently by an interior design firm specializing in book shelves. Poetic justice, I suppose.

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A dynamic father-daughter team, writer Peter Wortsman, a past contributor to Lit Hub, and artist-illustrator Aurélie Bernard Wortsman have been making books together since she was a tot. Their first published work, Odd Birds & Fat Cats: An Urban Bestiary (Turtle Point Press, 2024), is shortlisted for an Eric Hoffer Book Award. “Book Haven, Book Heaven” is excerpted from a second collaborative work nearing completion. The author of works of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, plays, travel writing and translations from the German, Peter is a former Fellow of the Fulbright (1973) and Thomas J. Watson Foundations (1974) and a Holtzbrinck Fellow at The American Academy in Berlin (2010) and the recipient of a Beard’s Fund Short Story Award (1985) and an Independent Publishers Book Award (2014), among other honors. Aurélie, a member of The Society of Illustrators, is cofounder of the comics duo Zou and Lou. Director of Andrew Edlin Gallery in downtown Manhattan, she has curated exhibitions including Beverly Buchanan: Northern Walls and Southern Yards (2023) and Agatha Wojciechowsky: Spirits Among Us (2021).