• 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

Old Fashioned Romance: A Couturier’s Tale.

PERISCOPE MAGAZINE : STYLE/DESIGN by Ashley Davidson / Photos: Seth Tillett. Vanity, that most punishable of vices, so often exposes the one thing we most intend for it to conceal: our selves. The couturier serves as wizard, historian and heretic, harnessing vanity to create deities from the detestable, while disguising the average as extraordinary. Above […]

The Book Problem

Were the problem book people like us, it would soon go away.  It is not our weaknesses, or our sentimentality, or our nostalgia.  It’s As If’ we’ve become obsolete and we haven’t.  By ‘we,’ I mean We the People of the book: Jews, Christians, Islamic people and a lot of people who believe what they […]

Maxims by the Pound

From ABC of Reading. Ezra Pound. Literature is language charged with meaning. Literature is news that STAYS news. If a nation’s literature declines, the nation atrophies and decays. Your legislator can’t legislate for the public good, you commander can’t command, you populace (if you be a democratic country) can’t instruct its ‘representatives’, save by language. […]