Nick Cave Donates Thousands of His Books to Secondhand Charity Bookshop

A major donation by Australian singer and writer Nick Cave to an Oxfam bookshop in Hove on England's south coast has drawn fans to browse the items from his personal library.

The 2,000 volumes come from the recent Stranger Than Kindness art installation in Canada and Copenhagen in collaboration with the Royal Danish Library which featured hundreds of objects belonging to Cave and included a recreation of his office featuring hundreds of his books.

A spokesperson for Oxfam said: “It’s a very interesting donation. The types of books are very wide ranging. There’s philosophy, art, religion, even old fiction paper backs. It’s an incredibly varied donation."

Among the titles are a first edition of Johnny Cash’s novel Man In White and a copy of The Lieutenant of Inishmore inscribed to Cave by Irish playwright Martin McDonagh, as well as books by Salman Rushdie, Christopher Hitchens and Ian McEwan. Although Cave's books do not have bookplates, they do include 'inclusions' used as bookmarks by him including his boarding pass for a flight to Amsterdam, a US map, and an empty packet of cigarettes. 

Cave lived for several years in nearby Brighton in the 2000s until the death of his son Arthur there in 2015.