Epstein’s Library

The first book receipts in Epstein’s inbox are about math, a subject he taught in a New York prep school before his Wall Street career.

Epstein ordered books on wisdom, suffering and spiritual healing.

On Christmas Eve, while Epstein’s team was trying to change the terms of his agreement with prosecutors, he ordered esoteric guides to tantric sex and erotic spirituality.

After the lull, Epstein bought two books about wealth—a guide to managing it and an obscure biography of a member of one of the world’s richest families.

Epstein bought two novels about a lecherous globetrotter named Harry Flashman.

Epstein picked a history of money and a guide to male fitness.

Epstein bought this novel about a socially awkward genetics professor looking for love. Two months earlier, Bill Gates published a blog post calling it one of the most profound novels he’d read in a long time.

Epstein’s next book purchase claims to scientifically prove that the dead are resurrected.

Epstein ordered six copies of a book explaining how to cater to billionaires.

At auction, biologist James Watson sold his Nobel Prize medal—awarded for his work discovering DNA’s structure—for more than $4 million to a Russian billionaire. Epstein ordered one of Watson’s memoirs that day, and another the next.

Epstein’s new purchases included books on Vatican secrets and Norman Mailer on feminism.

Epstein ordered and, after a delay, was sent a short-story collection by literary critic Edmund Wilson. It had been banned in New York for obscenity, which the Supreme Court upheld in 1948, though Wilson’s book was later revised and reprinted.

In the weeks before Epstein turned 63, he bought books by and about Woody Allen. The filmmaker was among the friends and neighbors who penned birthday tributes to Epstein that year, according to the New York Times. Allen’s letter compared Epstein’s mansion to Dracula’s castle, with “three young female vampires who service the place.” This year, the Sunday Times quoted Allen saying Epstein had told him he’d been “falsely put in jail in some way” and had been “trying to make up for it now by being philanthropic.”

Epstein’s new books ranged from a stoic guide to life to Don DeLillo’s novel about a billionaire chasing immortality and the work of philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein.

In the months before Epstein’s jail sentence, he had fielded advice from Howard Gardner, an influential psychologist at Harvard who helped start an initiative on living ethically. Years later, Epstein bought Gardner’s book about four geniuses and “our own extraordinariness.”

Epstein bought a neuroscientist’s essay on dishonesty, a psychologist’s books on good decisions and gut feelings, a “sensual memoir” and three works by Tom Wolfe.

Epstein bought a book by a pair of political scientists who argue that “bad behavior is almost always good politics.”

Epstein’s new purchases included a novelist’s memoir and two books about swearing.

Epstein bought more books on sex, money, evolution, medicine and the mind.

Epstein picked books from a communications strategist, one about great minds who “follow their inner voice” and the other advertised as “a persuasion manual for visionaries.”

Epstein’s next binge included a book applying economics and psychology to “help you negotiate anything,” guides to Bitcoin, Ethereum and the blockchain, Charles Murray on White Americans and pairs of books about plants and spies.

Epstein returned to some of the same subjects time and again: corruption, self-help and botany.

Epstein bought a two-part biography of Frank Sinatra and books on his go-to subjects—money, math and minds. And a memoir written by one of his lawyers was shipped.

On a single day, Epstein went on a Kindle binge, buying enough classic literature to last years. He picked the collected Shakespeare and Wilde, the complete novels of Dickens, all of Hemingway’s short stories and Naipaul’s collected short fiction, among others. Three weeks later, the Miami Herald began publishing its series on Epstein, “Perversion of Justice.”

These books show the idiosyncrasy of his interests: a work promising to answer “the enduring questions of life,” a sweeping biography of the Nazi leader, a “secret history of Israel’s targeted assassinations” and a guide to “negotiating as if your life depended on it.”

Almost a decade had gone by since Epstein served about 13 months in jail. Now federal investigators were once again looking at him. The books Epstein bought were about the themes that had attracted his attention for years—psychology, philosophy, the Vatican—as well as a guide to writing jokes.

According to the receipts in his inbox, his final book purchases also included a guide to successful parenting. (Epstein has no known children, though he and Maxwell had discussed fertility procedures.)

His last pick, just weeks before his arrest, was a work by the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche about pessimism and tragedy.