In 2002 Bravo’s Arts and Minds shot this piece on my career as a private librarian.  The channel, then devoted to the arts, was purchased by NBC and remodeled into a vehicle for Reality based TV – Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, Project Runway – and never showed in the US. 

My family and I have since moved from Brooklyn Heights to Sugar Hill in Washington Heights/Harlem, where in 2005 I opened Jumel Terrace Books.  The out-of-print and rare shop specializes in local history: African and American. 

 The Private Library is now in its 28^th year providing services to Bibliophiles: cataloguing, bibliography, appraisals, archival services, organization, moving, book searches and research.  We specialize in made-to-order and custom made libraries on all subjects. 

Muhammad Speaks. (Chicago: September 25, 1964 thru September 20th, 1968. 4 large folios, Vols. 4, 5, 6, 7. Extremely scarce. Library bound by Books and Things, New York. Extraordinary. Enquire for price.

Washington, Booker T. A New Negro for a New Century. (Chicago: American Publishing House, 1900) Very Good. No Jacket. First edition, early printing. Includes sections written by N.B. Wood and Fannie Barrier Williams. Eighteen chapters on notable African Americans of the Victorian era, including writers, soldiers, lawyers, politicians, doctors and society people, with portraits of the subjects. Green diagonal-fine-rib-grain cloth with gold, red, and blue stamping. Photo portrait of Washington in white paper onlay printed in brown ink on front. Gold stamping to spine. No decoration on back. Green endpapers. No DJ. Very good with some rubbing to gilt decoration, binding loosening but intact. Text block clean and near fine with some minor aging to paper. 428 pp. $350.00

Heldman, Marilyn with Stuart C. Munro-Hay. African Zion: The Sacred Art of Ethiopia. (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 1993) Wraps. Very good +. A well illustrated monograph on the Eastern Coptic Christian tradition of Ethiopia. $200.00

Jones, LeRoi & Larry Neal, eds. Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing. (New York: William Morrow, 1968.) Second Printing. Signed by Larry Neal.
1 ½” closed tear to dj, chipping to top of spine, otherwise very good. $170.00

Van der Zee, James, Owen Dodson, Camille Billops with a forward by Toni Morrison. The Harlem Book of the Dead. (Dobbs Ferry, NY: Morgan & Morgan, 1978) First printing, First edition. Signed by Camille Billops. Cloth/dj. Chips to dj, small closed tears, minor soiling. Scarce. $350.00

Nkrumah, Kwame. The Axioms of Kwame Nkrumah. (London: Nelson, 1967) First edition. Cloth/dj. Small chipping and closed tears to dj, otherwise very good. $45.00

Ben-Jochannan, Yosef. African Origins of the Major “Western Religions.” (New York: Alkebu-Lan Books, 1970.) Wraps, minor soiling, otherwise very good. $85.00

Other titles include Dr. Ben’s Black Men of the Nile, Malcolm X Speaks, Basil Davidson’s biography of Kwame Nkrumah Black Star, Harold Courlander’s Tales of Yoruba Gods and Heros, Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth and Black Skin, White Masks, and ornitologist R.W. Shufeldt’s scurrilous The Negro: A Menace to American Civilization, 1907.

I am no more accustomed to seeing my muse than you are but Lauren’s shown it to me as in a symbolist fever dream. In one of the photos, titled Duality and Death, Indira’s perfectly poised freak Wodaabe chic is just out and there I am with my hands out. My Phoenix arises from the ashes in that dynamite picture of the piano and takes flight in the back yard. As the young people say, nowadays, It’s all about the Holy Ghost.

Of course, no book this fall is as unexpected, or as unexpectedly delightful, as Life Turns Man Up and Down (Pantheon), a sampler of African market literature selected by Kurt Thometz.
L.A. Times. David L. Ulin. Between the Covers.
Fall Books Offer Compelling Works of Emotional Depth. Sept. 12, 2001

This anthology, “Life Turns Man Up and Down: High Life, Useful Advice and Mad English,” displays these often funny and always fascinating artifacts — sexy stories like “Why Harlots Hate Married Men and Love Bachelors” and “Why I Killed My White Lover” to more contemplative offerings like “Sayings of the Wise” and a play called “The Statements of Hitler Before the World War.” These chapbooks have the spirit of creativity, exuberance and adventure of a popular forum that offered an exchange of ideas and desires for every man.
Salon.com Sept. 20, 2001

It’s worth noting that the booklets are wonderfully reproduced in the original typefaces and with the occasional illustration intact. More than that, however, the paper has the appearance and color of vintage newsprint, making it the most aesthetically pleasing book to come out of a major publishing house in a long time. As a physical object, it is a joy to read. Thometz’s book isn’t the first such collection of market literature to appear upon our shores, but it is a welcome insight into this underappreciated written tradition and it provides a wonderful insight into the commingling of culture and technology.
Phildelphia City Paper. book quarterly.
The World Writ Small: Little books mean a lot in Life Turns Man Up and Down.
Andrew Ervin. September 27-October 4, 2001.

Documenting the adaptation of an oral culture to literacy and modernization, these stories, moral guides, and how-to manuals were both lively and confusing, written in an exuberant pidgin called Mad English and littered with felicitous nonsense.
The New Yorker. Briefly Noted. Oct. 8, 2001.

The book is a riot of poetry that’s as sublime as it is often accidental. Befitting the work of a rare bookman, Life Turns Man Up and Down is as fun to hold as it is to read. At Thometz’s insistence, it evokes and reproduces the look and even a bit of the feel of the original pamphlets, the jumbled typefaces and darling illustrations and off-color paper stock. It’s a beautiful production.
New York Press, Publishing.
John Strausbaugh. High Life & Mad English. Nov. 28, 2001.

“Their literature is one of the rare occasions where the introduction of the Word to a primarily oral society is laid bare in print,” private librarian Kurt Thometz, who selected the entries, writes in a fascinating essay. What’s more, Life Turns Man Up and Down is the most beautifully designed book of the year.
The Austin Chronicle 12.21.01

This anthology of Nigerian “market literature” — pulp pamphlets, now collectors’ items, that were sold in open-air markets until the 1960′s — is a wild excursion into the collective unconscious of an emerging nation.
New York Times. Books in Brief: Life Turns Man Up and Down. Eric P. Nash. 12.30.01.

The first thing you’ll notice when you pick up this collection of 1960s African market literature from the eastern Nigerian town of Onitsha is that it’s a virtual riot: the outlandish, overgrown, even incomprehensible language (dubbed “Mad English” or “Young English”); the bizarre cover art and fractured typography (replicated here in irresistible facsimiles); the hodgepodge of literary genres and styles (from romance and adventure to moral instruction); the bold pen names of authors like Okenwa Olisah (a/k/a “Your Popular Author, The Strong Man of the Pen” and “Master of the Universe”), or C.N.O. Moneyhard, or the writer simply known as Speedy Eric.
Village Voice. Riot Lit. Anderson Tepper. Jan. 2-8, 2002.