Too Many Books? Mendel Uminer faced a crisis when his landlord objected to the 10,000 volumes in his New York studio apt

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https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/09/style/too-many-books-new-york-city-apartment-scholar-landlord.html?unlocked_article_code=1.wVA.vysv.5b8BxuYxRDnK&smid=url-share




For a young Jewish scholar and writer named Mendel Uminer, books are the wellspring of enlightenment. So when he scored a studio apartment a block away from Central Park on Manhattan’s Upper East Side a year ago, he brought his books with him — all 10,000 of them. What followed, at least for a little while, was a charmed existence in his 600-square-foot temple of knowledge.

Towering stacks of Judaica lined the walls, heaps of film criticism and opera history filled the prewar bathroom, piles of plays and poems blocked a window, and Uminer slept on a floor mattress engulfed in dog-eared novels. Waking up around noon, he spent his afternoons on his sunlit chaise, devouring the works of Yiddish writers like Chaim Grade and critics like Edmund Wilson, nourishing his mind while the city churned outside.

“I’m always reading,” Uminer, 31, said. “I’m reading to extract knowledge. Every book I own, I need. My library is my manual for life.”

This past winter, he received a notice from building management. “You are violating a substantial obligation of your tenancy,” it began. “You are maintaining the Premises in a severely overcluttered condition; permitting the over-accumulation of books in the Premises; creating a fire hazard by over-accumulating combustible books in the Premises.”

“I open this letter,” Uminer recalled, “and they’re telling me my books are a fire hazard, that I have to be out if I don’t get rid of them.”

After he did not heed the warning, eviction proceedings began. He decided to fight back in court.