“It was an amount of books you wouldn’t necessarily want to live with,” he said, and he and his wife moved to an apartment nearby and left the place to the books, setting the stage for a quirky bit of New York history.

Mr. Seidenberg plied his trade at book fairs and on sidewalks for some years. But around 2008, with the help of George Bisacca, a conservator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, he turned the book-stuffed apartment into a secret bookstore, open at select times or by appointment to friends and admirers. Sometimes a visitor might actually buy a book, but the place was more like a salon, with literary figures and book lovers mingling and sharing a drink at a bar stocked mostly with liquor contributed by patrons.

Mr. Seidenberg thought it filled a niche.

“It’s a bigger thing than a bookstore — it’s a community of writers,” he told The New York Times in 2015. “Dylan Thomas is not drinking in the West Village anymore. Kerouac and the Beats are not hanging out. So this is a place people can come.”

Soon the covert bookstore/salon was not so covert; “every year, it got less and less secret,” Mr. Seidenberg acknowledged. It may have become too well known. In 2015 the landlord, saying the site was more store than apartment, began eviction proceedings.

The closing that year became somewhat circuslike, with lots of news coverage and curiosity seekers.

“By the end there were a lot of hangers-on who were there for booze and not for books,” Mr. Seidenberg told The Guardian. “The inner-circle people weren’t happy those last days.”