One of the great joys in life—and thereby also one of the great tragedies of the COVID-19 lockdown which prohibits such an activity—is strolling slowly through the stacks of a bookshop, scanning titles, rummaging through piles of worn books and trying to judge whether the wares are worthy of a purchase through whatever magical means one has devised to evaluate a book based mostly on its cover. The documentary film The Booksellers is mostly about this sacred activity of perusal and purchasing, and it mainly succeeds at translating the love for the bookshop into the cinematic medium.
The Booksellers details the local bookstore scene in New York, with an emphasis on those dealers specializing in rare books. The film offers a compelling, if scattershot and incomplete, history of the rise of the book trade in 20th-century Manhattan and surveys many of the challenges that this niche industry faces today. It introduces the viewer to several of the more prominent book merchants in the city and reveals something of their process for running their businesses, particularly the rather arcane methods they employ to acquire their stock.
Throughout the documentary, the topical focus wavers, as sometimes the film seems centered on the rare book as a physical object while at other times it shifts instead to the business of buying and selling books. It is strongest in the former situation, looking at the material culture of books, and weakest in the latter, examining the highs and lows of dealing in book peddling. This latter topic becomes especially problematic once the book dealers begin to whinge about the impact of the internet on their business. As seems to so often be the case with New Yorkers, they cannot grapple with the reality that most of the world does not live in New York City; they fail to understand that online sales or streaming (in the case of cinema) democratize access to cultural artifacts, allowing people in places such as Kentucky, Idaho or even Azerbaijan to enjoy the same books and films that used to be the exclusive privilege of New Yorkers. Fortunately, this segment of The Booksellers is quite short. Additionally, director D. W. Young does an admirable job of presenting contrasting viewpoints among the booksellers by allowing dissenting narration between them. Not all of the booksellers find the internet wholly deplorable (hilariously, those not condemning online sales are both non-native New Yorkers). Overall, Young keeps the film on track via a consistent tone, which could be described as reverential, and shifting from one book merchant to another often enough that the flip-flopping focus between books and the business of dealing them does not matter as much.
Ultimately, The Booksellers triumphs at appealing to book-loving viewers. Young fills the film with a diverse cast of book merchants—there are women, people of color and young folks, even though this is an industry dominated, or so the viewer is told, by old white men—and a sweeping perspective on what constitutes book culture, ranging from Gutenberg Bibles to ‘90s hip-hop magazines. This should reel in the skeptics. In addition, The Booksellers is performing the same role as rebroadcasts of historical sporting contests in these times of quarantine: since no one can visit their local bookshop at the moment, allow the alchemy of the moving image to provide a stand-in, as The Booksellers takes viewers to about a dozen different bookstores throughout its runtime. This film is as close to a cherished pastime as we are going to get for quite a while.
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