He tends to retain his best inventory.

“I’m a good book buyer, but if the collection seems like genius, it’s really that I’m just a horrible bookseller,” he said.

That collection includes fiction, theater and New York City-themed books around the bar, and a corner niche of paperback pulp.

Near the coat rack are ethnic, art and photography sections. Science fiction, poetry and film are in a larger, central room, with first editions and rarities in an adjacent snug.

The apartment has been rid of its appliances. There are no sinks, not even in the narrow bathroom.

The bar is the hub, with a waist-high bookshelf (biographies), a counter top, an old-style icebox and a modest inventory of liquor mostly contributed by patrons throughout the evening.

Its placement, where a checkout counter might be, seems fitting, since Mr. Seidenberg runs the shop more like a salon than a for-profit business; he splits his time between the apartment and his wife’s place nearby.

“It’s a bigger thing than a bookstore — it’s a community of writers,” he said. “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. You don’t even have to be a book person.”

Mr. Seidenberg grew up in Brooklyn and Queens. He studied drama in high school and at Queensborough Community College. He became a puppeteer and ran his troupe, and a moving company, out of a storefront on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn.