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

[BlueWaveNeverEnd]

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.

[Midnight Writer]

1. Uh-oh. Looks like my house. Thankfully, I fully own my house and don't have to worry about a landlord.

[mopinko]

2. books r heavy. that many books needs reinforcement.

plus, yeah, hoarder.
sorry dude.

[BWdem4life]

3. Peculiar place to have post this one

Apparently he decided to drop the suit and move because he didn't want to live somewhere he wasn't wanted. But he did find a larger place.

[buzzycrumbhunger]

4. Having to move a mountain like that

… nudged me toward eBooks. Once you have to hoist 140 boxes of books around you rarely even read more than once, it becomes easier to let go. I love books but I can have 10 times as many in my damned eReader and the only increase in weight is my guilt for not being able to read them all (because I’m too busy downloading new ones). Not that I’ve followed through by finding homes for the ones I’ll never read again...

The daily freebie book emails are my love—and my nemesis.

[hunter]

5. My wife and I were saved by ebooks.

When my wife and I married we each had hundreds of books. Now we're into the thousands of paper books. It would be much, much worse without ebooks. Hoarded ebooks don't take up any space.

My relationship to books has changed a lot. I think I'm a pretty good judge now of what books I'll never read or reference again and I don't feel bad about giving those books away even if they end up in the "free" bins only to be thrown away when nobody takes them. I'll even throw away books I wouldn't want anyone else to suffer. There are some authors I was once intrigued by whose work did not age well.

A great hoard of ebooks can be found at Project Gutenberg.

https://gutenberg.org/