Booksellers ★★★★

Documentary an in-depth paean to bookstores

Film review

The Booksellers

Cast: Parker Posey, Fran Lebowitz, Gay Talese Director: D.W. Young Duration: 1 h 39 m

“The only thing I regret is the books I’ve never bought.”

If that strikes home, you owe it to yourself to see The Booksellers, an extremely New York documentary — Fran Lebowitz features prominently — about the rare and used book trade and the people who inhabit it.

Clearly the market has seen better days. One interviewee notes that in 1950 Manhattan boasted 368 bookstores; today it’s fewer than 80.

But don’t expect books to roll over after a better- than550-year run — even though the Internet has created its share of issues, eschewing paper in favour of e- books and paradoxically making the hunt for rare books easier while killing the thrill of the sport. ( Mea culpa: Just about the first thing I did online, in 1993, was buy a copy of The Quiet Earth from a bookshop in New Zealand. I felt like a character in Neuromancer.)

Director D.W. Young casts a wide net with his first feature- length doc. There are chapters devoted to various aspects: the Strand Bookstore; the three sisters who run Argosy Book Store ( as seen in Can You Ever Forgive Me?); book jackets; autographs; famous auctions; women collectors in a mostly male world; and specialty collectors, like a hip- hop archivist and the guy whose trove of children’s books started when he was 12.

There’s also a wonderful clip of Diana Ossana and Larry Mcmurtry accepting an Oscar for best adapted screenplay for Brokeback Mountain in 2006. He concluded: “Finally, I’m going to thank all the booksellers of the world … from the humblest paperback exchange to the masters of the great bookshops … all are contributors to the survival of the culture of the book, a wonderful culture, which we mustn’t lose.”

They didn’t even play him off. Long live the book! ΠΠΠΠ The Booksellers opens March 13 at the Hot Docs Ted Rogers cinema in Toronto; March 27 in Edmonton; and April 3 in Calgary.