Nick Cave has caused a frenzy among his fans after he donated 2,000 books from his personal collection to a charity shop in Hove.
The “Red Right Hand” singer reportedly made the donation to an Oxfam bookshop on Blatchington Road in the East Sussex seaside resort.
The books were said to have once been part of an art installation that Cave made in collaboration with filmmakers Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard, which was shown in Canada and Denmark.
Speaking to The Argus, an employee at the shop said: “Someone from Cave’s organisation contacted Oxfam centrally. There was an art installation about Nick Cave and his working processes, which had toured.
“Part of this installation was his library,” he added. “When this ended the books went into storage and then they came to us.”
The employee noted that the donation was “interesting” and “varied” and it included books on “philosophy, art, religion and even old fiction paperbacks”.
The Times reports that authors whose works were included in the collection included Salman Rushdie, Christopher Hitchens and Ian McEwan, as well as Johnny Cash’s first novel Man in White.
Fans of Cave have since flocked to the store to see what types of memorabilia they can pick up for themselves. According to the employee: “A couple [of the books] have plane tickets used as bookmarks but apart from that, it’s not like he was one of these people who had a book plate or wrote his name in.”
Among the reported discoveries has been a boarding pass belonging to Cave for a flight to Amsterdam, a map of the US, and an old envelope with the words “Luke’s tooth” written on it. Cave’s son, Luke, is now 34.
A publicist for Cave said that the star didn’t want to comment on the donation, explaining: “He thinks the discoveries will remain intriguing mysteries for those who find them.”
The Cave family lived in Brighton for approximately 20 years, before leaving in 2017 following the death of one of their sons.
Arthur, who was just 15, suffered a fatal brain injury after falling from a cliff onto the overpass of Ovingdean Gap in Brighton on 14 July 2015, after taking LSD for the first time with a friend. The cause of death was listed as “multiple traumatic injuries due to a fall from a height”.
After Arthur’s death, Cave and his family temporarily moved to Los Angeles, after finding it too difficult to live “just down the road from where it happened”.
“I was forced to grieve publicly – and that was helpful, weirdly enough,” the 67-year-old told The Guardian in March 2024. “It stopped me completely shutting the windows and bolting the doors and just living in this dark world.”
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