Michael Jackson “Extremely Well-Read,” Had 10,000 Books

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July 02, 2009

Michael Jackson "Extremely Well-Read," Had 10,000 Books


Apparently so, and hooray. He was an avid reader who had an appropriately majestic library at Neverland that held 10,000 volumes on its shelves, according to two recent Los Angeles newspaper articles.

In the midst of a lengthy interview in the L.A. Weekly, Jackson attorney Bob Sanger revealed the following as his last of three golden attributes that defined the Gloved One.

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"He loved to read. He had over 10,000 books at his house. And I know that because - and I hate to keep referring to the case, because I don't want the case - the case should not define him. But one of the things that we learned - the DA went through his entire library and found, for instance, a German art book from 1930-something. And it turned out that the guy who was the artist behind the book had been prosecuted by the Nazis. Nobody knew that, but then the cops get up there and say, 'We found this book with pictures of nude people in it.' But it was art, with a lot of text. It was art. And they found some other things, a briefcase that didn't belong to him that had some Playboys in it or something. But they went through the guy's entire house, 10,000 books. And it caused us to do the same thing, and look at it."


"And there were places that he liked to sit, and you could see the books with his bookmarks in it, with notes and everything in it where he liked to sit and read. And I can tell you from talking to him that he had a very - especially for someone who was self-taught, as it were, and had his own reading list - he was very well-read. And I don't want to say that I'm well-read, but I've certainly read a lot, let's put it that way, and I enjoy philosophy and history and everything myself, and it was very nice to talk to him, because he was very intellectual, and he liked to talk about those things. But he didn't flaunt it, and it was very seldom that he would initiate the conversation like that, but if you got into a conversation like that with him, he was there."

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Former Los Angeles resident Cynde Moya remembers that "back when I worked at the Bookstar in Culver City, his people would have us keep the store open after hours, and he'd come in with a vanload of kids, who could buy whatever books they wanted."

He was a longtime and valued customer," a spokesperson for Hennessey + Ingalls, the renowned art and architecture bookstore in Santa Monica, said in the L.A. Times piece.

It is a fact that intellect and pop entertainment values do not mix well in American culture: A pop star could never mysteriously disappear for a few days, drive family, friends, and the nation crazy with anxiety, then resurface with the rambling confession that he was incognito in Buenos Aires visiting the sultry, irresistible National Library of Argentina, full of hot-blooded Latin-American tomes, because he needed a change of scenery.




Michael Jackson loved to read and he passed that on to his children