Epstein’s Library
The disgraced financier purchased books about making money, treating narcissism, negotiating with anyone, achieving ecstasy and understanding life
In October 2016, when a new book about Jeffrey Epstein came out, he bought 17 copies. A few months after that, he picked up six books about narcissism.
And in 2019, in Epstein’s last weeks of freedom, he made his final purchases for his Kindle: a guide to raising children, though he wasn’t known to have any, The Annotated Lolita and Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy.
Epstein has been one of the most scrutinized figures in contemporary America, and his crimes among the more notorious. Just this week, a congressional committee released a trove of documents from Epstein’s estate, which shows him saying President Donald Trump “knew about the girls”—a claim Trump has repeatedly denied—and hobnobbing with powerful figures from politics, academia and the media. Even so, much about Epstein’s life and success remains an enigma.
But a separate cache of more than 18,000 emails obtained by Bloomberg News offers another window into the mind of a sex offender who federal officials say harmed as many as 1,000 people.
Epstein, a university dropout, was an avid reader with eclectic tastes—or at least a voracious purchaser of books, according to receipts from Amazon that were sent to his private Yahoo account. The purchases don’t reveal all. He may have given some books to others, and anyone who’s ever bought a book knows it doesn’t necessarily get read. But they illuminate some of what interested him: genes, Vatican conspiracy, Woody Allen, negotiation, Trump, high modernism, middlebrow erotica and why we love the people who hurt us.
This timeline examines the books Epstein bought in the final decade of his life. It begins in September 2007, around the time he signed his notorious non-prosecution agreement—an arrangement that closed a federal investigation in exchange for his guilty plea to state charges in Florida—and ends in 2019, just weeks before his death in a jail cell in New York.
On July 6, 2019, Epstein traveled by jet to Teterboro Airport in New Jersey, where he was arrested. He was then charged with sex trafficking minors. On Aug. 10, in his jail cell in New York City, he was found dead.