Mr. Michaux, who was born in Newport News, Va., on Aug. 4,1885, said that he had never worked for anyone one day in his life. But he also said he had picked peas as a youth, washed windows and later served as a church deacon. late brother was Elder Solomon Lightfoot Michela, the evangelist.

Mr. Michaux left the church, disenchanted. “I don't want any religion that takes away my individuality,” he said in an interview last May.

Mr. Michaux first sold books from a wagon, and then from the store on Seventh Avenue, as the street was then called. He slept in the back of his bookstore.

“You couldn't find 15 to 20 books by black people,” he said. He added that his receipts then for a day's sales were often only 75 cents or a dollar. When he retired, he said, he was taking in up to $1,500 a day.

When he closed his store, which was moved in 1968 to West 125th Street from Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard to make room for the State Harlem Office Building, he had amassed an inventory of 200,000 hooks by and about black people. His bookstore was the largest in Harlem.

Jean Blackwell Hutson, the curator of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, a New York Public Library facility, said Mr. Michaux's store complemented the Schomberg by selling books that could be read but not borrowed from the library.

Ready Wit

Mr. Michaux was a peppery, charming, streetwise Harlemite whose wit was legendary.

“Negro is a thing,” he used to say. “Use it, abuse, it, accuse it, refuse it.”