Nach Waxman, Founder Of Beloved UES Bookshop, Dies At 84

UPPER EAST SIDE, NY — Nach Waxman, who gave countless New Yorkers windows into new culinary worlds as the founder and proprietor of the Upper East Side bookshop Kitchen Arts & Letters, died unexpectedly on Wednesday. He was 84.

The cause was a sudden illness, said Matt Sartwell, who co-owns the shop on Lexington Avenue near East 93rd Street, and who worked alongside Waxman since being hired as a clerk in 1991.

A former doctoral student in anthropology at Harvard, Waxman had worked for years in the publishing industry before he quit, wishing to be his own boss. Opening a bookstore was the obvious next step.

"He knew, probably right off the bat, that he wanted to specialize, and his two choices were sports books or food books," Sartwell said. "He decided that more people made their living from food than from sports, so there would be a more stable need."

Waxman was attracted to family-friendly Carnegie Hill, which was less "hot" than the trendier Upper West Side and had rents affordable enough to allow for some risk-taking. (His name, which was pronounced like "Knock," was short for Nahum.)

Though he was an avid cook, Waxman had never worked in the field professionally. After opening the shop, however, he realized how much he had internalized in childhood from being near his mother as she prepared meals.

"One of the constant themes from Nach was that if you grow up in a kitchen around someone who’s cooking, you start to understand the way certain things happen," Sartwell recalled. "Even if you're not actively helping, you perceive that there's a certain order in which things are done."

Over time, the shop gained a reputation for its staggeringly deep inventory and attentive customer service. A 1995 profile in the New York Times shows Waxman listening patiently to a haughty customer's fine-dining complaints before helping another find a cookbook with detailed descriptions of Indian condiments.

"These books are my pride and joy," he told the Times.

Customers at Kitchen Arts & Letters run the gamut from professional chefs to utter amateurs. It didn't matter to Waxman, who was "just as happy to find someone a good book on cooking weeknight fish as he was to help someone doing research on food in 18th-century French theater," Sartwell said.

Within the past decade, Waxman stopped coming into the store each day and shifted to "semi-retirement" — which, to him, meant a constant search for rare or out-of-print books to add to the store.

His finds included a book about Jewish food in Greece before World War II, and a tome devoted to Irish butter published by the Butter Museum in Cork, which Waxman discovered while traveling through that country. (Waxman's other contributions to the culinary world include a widely-reprinted brisket recipe.)

As a kid, my favorite place in any bookstore was the Cookbook section.

So, imagine my delight walking into this little shop in NYC that was nothing but cookbooks, including the most obscure titles and volumes of books devoted to single ingredients.

He left an impact, for sure. https://t.co/H6ar7JGlio
— Best Food Blog Ever (@BestFoodBlogEVR) August 5, 2021

Waxman leaves the shop in steady hands. After nearly being wiped out by the pandemic, Kitchen Arts & Letters raised over $100,000 through an online fundraiser last fall, helping it repay debts and catch up on rent.

The bookstore's memorials to Waxman on social media generated dozens of tributes, ranging from chef Alex Guarnaschelli to New York Times wine columnist Eric Asimov.

Waxman's survivors include his wife, Maron, and a son and daughter.