All for the love of books
The Booksellers (E, 99 mins) Directed by D W Young Reviewed by James Croot ★★★1⁄2
This light, bright look into the world of rare books feels like both a celebration of and eulogy for the profession/obsession.
While highlighting those who have dedicated their lives to buying and selling first editions of Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale and copies of Louisa May Alcott’s little-known sideline in pulp fiction, it also offers up dire warnings about the dwindling number of bibliophiles among us.
New York City boasted 368 bookstores in 1950. The number when D W Young filmed this documentary in 2017 was 79.
Yes, the impact of the now outof-favour bricks-and-mortar bookbarns like Barnes & Noble and online stores has also resulted in Fourth Avenue’s ‘‘book row’’ dwindling from 48 shops to one.
But this carefully curated selection of interviewees, who include Strand Bookstore owner Nancy Bass Wyden, the three sisters of Argosy, Law & Order
actor Fran Lebowitz and writer Susan Orlean also lament the decline of book reading in general.
Books have gone from being considered the repository of knowledge to simply an artefact. That means those in the rare books trade have had to pivot more towards having the best, cheapest or only copies, or works of art like jewel-encrusted tomes and one-ofa-kind manuscripts and ephemera to pay the bills. Even the thrill of book collecting itself has somewhat dissipated, the film argues, with the internet making finding what once seemed virtually impossible, sometimes easily available with just a few clicks.
That might make it all sound like a bit of a maudlin-fest – fortunately it’s not. The eclectic characters and their sometimes labyrinthine book-filled spaces are frequently delightful, anxious to shake the traditional cinematic representation of fusty, tweedjacketed, leather-patched ageing white men, as depicted in the likes of The Ninth Gate or 84 Charing Cross Road (although there is noone here as swarthy as Olivier Martinez’s Paul Martel in 2002’s Unfaithful).
There’s also a fascinating glimpse into the annual New York International Antiquarian Book Fair, held in a former indoor tennis court on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, where purveyors try to persuade people to part with their money for copies of Edgar Allan Poe’s near-mythical Tamerlane and other Poems, sometimes complete with coffee cup ring on the dust jacket.
And, ultimately, The Booksellers also offers hope of a book-reading resurgence. As Lebowitz pithily observes: ‘‘The people I see reading actual books on the subway are mostly in their 20s. This is one of the few encouraging things you’ll ever see on the subway.’’
The Booksellers is now screening in select cinemas.