• Jumel Terrace Books

    Revolutionary & Colonial Washington Heights, Harlem, Africa, West Indies, Art, Myth, History & Literature: Slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, Theology, Military, Labor, Civil Rights, Negritude, Black Power.

"An Oasis for the Unrestrained Pursuit of Knowledge"
*************And a "Nugget" in the Rubbish*************

Uptown's only bookshop specializing in local history, African & American. The shop on 160th Street, open by appointment or serendipity, faces the Morris-Jumel Mansion, the headquarters of George Washington during 1776’s Battle of Harlem Heights, & our stock addresses its significance in 18th & 20th century Revolutionary American history.

As Sugar Hill, the neighborhood has retained its reputation as the intellectual & artistic home of Black America. Jumel Terrace Books follows in the tradition of bookstores serving the community since George Young’s Book Exchange opened in 1920. Before Black Studies entered college curriculums in 1968, shops like Lewis Micheaux’s House of Common Sense & Home of Proper Propaganda & Richard B Moore’s Frederick Douglass Book Center were important sources of education, aspiration & inspiration. As did our predecessors, we buy & sell very good books on our subjects.

Jumel Terrace Books - Blog

Front lines

Monday morning and I am still marveling at the tall so-fey Alabaman Alvin Ailey dancer who visited the shop on Saturday afternoon.  After fielding the usual query to my ulterior motives, I was informed that a lot of black people don’t like to be reminded of their past, as it is too painful. “A lot […]

Literary ladies preferred. A short list.

Lady Murasaki, Isabelle Eberhardt, Willa Cather, Anna Akhmatova, Marianne Moore, Gertrude Stein, Anita Loos, Djuna Barnes, Zora Neale Hurston, Jean Rhys, Eudora Welty, Elizabeth Bishop, Flannery O’Connor, Dawn Powell, Caroline Gordon, Grace Metalious, Pauline Réage, Violette Ledoc, Claire Lispector, M.F.K. Fisher, Paula Fox, Patricia Highsmith, Joan Didion, Fran Lebowitz, Kate Millett, Susanna Moore, Nawal el-Saadawi, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. […]

Michael Suarez on Digital Books & the Future of Bibliographic Knowledge

If you can bear with the stodgy Grolier Club introduction, Michael Suarez, editor of The Oxford Companion to the Book, weighing in on the difference between the physical and the digital book is as good an explanation as I’ve heard of the most sub…