Wanna Buy A Book?(The Talk of the Town)(Brazen Head Books)

Michael Seidenberg has a beard with deckled edges, a boyish face with only minor wear, a spine in fine shape, a mint mind, and a Brooklyn provenance, circa early nineteen-fifties. He also has a used-book shop, but mum's the word. Brazen Head Books, originally situated in Brooklyn and, later, on East Eighty-fourth Street in Manhattan, has just reemerged (after a decade-long retirement) as a by-appointment-only concern, housed in an apartment whose address Seidenberg would just as soon keep secret.

One recent Sunday, several writers, a couple of filmmakers, a photographer, an art restorer, a scientist, and certain other personages gathered at this hideaway to celebrate--in a nonchalant sort of way--Brazen Head's latest incarnation. They had been invited by the novelist Jonathan Lethem, who met Seidenberg about thirty years ago, when Lethem, then fourteen, worked at the Brooklyn shop, doing grunt work in exchange for books.

The guests, as per invitation, arrived at staggered intervals, for the not-Barnes-&-Noble-scale operation space--three cozy rooms and a closet-size nook--was hardly meant for crowds. Still, there was a remarkable abundance of books.

"Is this, like, the greatest garage sale of all time?" Vince Passaro, a novelist and essayist, said. Passaro was browsing in the middle room, where there is a section dedicated to the works of John Cowper Powys, one of Seidenberg's favorites and the author of the 1956 novel " The Brazen Head." A brazen head, should you have forgotten your medieval history, is a brass head that was supposedly able to answer any question. The statue's powers, Seidenberg explained, sitting at a big old desk, were dormant until an alchemical rite was performed, the last step of which required the involvement of a Hebrew virgin. "The reason we have so few brazen heads in contemporary times," he theorized, "is that it's hard to find a Hebrew virgin nowadays."

In the back room, the writers Peter Straub, Sean Wilsey, and Nathan Englander were playing Name That Year--holding up collectible books and trying to guess the year of publication. They were also discussing why two similar-looking first editions of Marilynne Robinson's "Housekeeping" were priced so differently. "Foxing," Wilsey said, adding that that was the only biblio term he knew and he ...