I never imagined I would read in the NY Times that my two passions had convened into a litmus test: can you own too many books if you are a renter?

Mendel Uminer had 10,000 books in his personal library that happened to be a 600-square-foot rented studio on the Upper East Side.
He slept on a mattress buried in novels and woke up around noon, which, if we're being honest, sounds like my dream.
Unfortunately, his building saw his books as a fire hazard. They asked him to thin the herd, and he said no (how could you ever pick your favorites, I get it), and eviction proceedings started.

It's a sympathetic story, and I bet anyone who read that story picked a side within about four sentences.
From what I can tell, the internet has decided the landlord was the villain (aren't we always), but we've all done enough site visits to know better.

A fire marshal doesn't care about or admire your first editions. They will measure square footage, check the egress path, and do the math on how fast a mattress fire finds 10,000 pounds of kindling stacked to the ceiling.

I've stood in units where the resident adored me, swore everything was under control, and still couldn't get the front door open more than eighteen inches.

Property managers carry every "what if" nobody wants to think about until 3 a.m. because it's the job to protect the property, the asset, and the other residents.

Uminer, for what it's worth, ran a literary journal out of that apartment, and threw parties where writers drank cheap beer and argued about Greek poetry between the stacks. His books had an audience, and he was building community. And who wouldn't want a resident whose main hobby is reading quietly?
I can easily compare that to the hoarder cases in units I've walked into where the piles of trash and paper had no witnesses at all. There were no guests; no community building, and these residents were not hosting parties and didn't have visitors.

Passion tends to pull people in.
Hoarding tends to isolate and keep people sequestered in loneliness.
Obviously it's not a perfect test, but it seems to be an easy tell.

I don't think Uminer's landlord necessarily got this one wrong.
I do think they were handed an impossible needle to thread, protecting a building full of other people while renting to a man whose life's work happened to violate code.

As a passionate book lover, I hope Uminer's books found a place with taller shelves and better bones.

But I also hope his old landlord and management sleep just fine, having done the one thing nobody ever thanks you for in property management: the seemingly impossible but responsible hard choice that protects everyone, even from themselves.


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