Miles Bellamy, a New York City native, has been a book-lover since childhood. He grew up in the NY art-world and among his parents’ modest but special libraries. He worked in bookstores in Vermont, New York and San Francisco, apprenticing at Diluvian books on Haight Street with Todd Pratum. He worked for his father, Richard Bellamy, at Oil & Steel Gallery in LIC, NY 1994-1998 and then founded Spoonbill & Sugartown, Booksellers in Williamsburg, Brooklyn from which, in 2021, he resigned in ecstasy.
Where does the name Diamond Hollow come from?
It came to my wife Susie in a dream and she went to Miles and told him, and they saw that it was good. It was Venus — rising between two mountains, in a Hollow. It looked like a diamond. You’ve seen this phenomenon, too, whenever a star or planet seems to nestle on the horizon, cradled between two hills.
The Hollow is the dark, receptive place, while the Diamond is the hardest object in the world, indestructible and able to pierce through our delusions. In Chinese medicine, the hollow is also where the needle will go. So, the hard and the soft, the dark and the light, the dance that moment by moment we perform to maintain the balance of ch’i within us. And in Tibetan Buddhism one of the most important sutras is the Vajrayana Sutra, or Diamond Vehicle, The Diamond That Cuts Through Illusion. It’s the oldest dated, printed book in existence.
It goes on. While we had some familiarity with this part of the Catskills, we came up with our name before we moved up here and before we knew we had a shop and before we discovered that just about every road up here is a darned hollow – nearby us are Wolf Hollow, Canada Hollow, Jones Hollow, Shaver Hollow, Chimney Hollow, Pumpkin Hollow, Huntley Hollow, Doig Hollow, Meeker Hollow, Bragg Hollow, Weaver Hollow…and on and on. Hollow hollow! Hollow be thy name!
So, Diamond Hollow Books was established with the belief that books can be a vehicle on the path to enlightenment, & that paying attention to your breath is the essential first step toward the same.
One of us is selling books, the other is practicing her healing arts. We think of these aspects of the business as our humble way of expressing gratitude for the bounty all around us and for the love, as Dante says, “that moves the sun and the stars.”