The Booksellers: Doc on New York Bookstores Jammed to the Rafters with Rare Insights

By Liam Lacey

Rating: B

“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library,” wrote Jorge Luis Borges. Or, if there’s capitalism in heaven, perhaps a book shop will do?

The Booksellers — a documentary about antiquarian booksellers and aimed at disciples of the book — begins with the annual New York International Antiquarian Book Fair in the Park Avenue Armory. In many ways, it’s specific to the city, and the East Village book merchants and sellers that helped create the city’s cultural personality.

Over the course of its 99 minutes, this well-stuffed documentary digresses into the history of collecting, landmark bookselling businesses and their owners in Manhattan, visits to auctions, talk of the effect of the Internet, and timely segments on gender and racial diversity, the “death of the book.” There are even some literary celebrities — Gay Talese (briefly), and Fran Lebowitz and Susan Orlean, who are recurrent subjects. Books, too, have a certain cachet: A Gutenberg Bible, a Shakespeare folio, an early Poe edition, and a book bound in jewels or even human skin.'

Along the way, we meet a bevy of idiosyncratic types who live for the book as fetish object: David Bergman, who keeps his giant natural history books in his Upper West Side apartment. Dealer Jim Cummins takes us to his New Jersey warehouse, home to 300,000 books and a collection of purses. Priceline founder Jay Walker has a private library dedicated to the “Library of the Human Imagination” and inspired by M.C. Escher.

Part of the documentary is elegiac, signaled by the insistent retro-jazz score from David Ullmann. Before there were “independent bookstores” notes Lebowitz, “there were just bookstores.” Then the book chains came and, in many cases, went. Nancy Bass Wyden, third-generation owner of The Strand in the East Village, points out that while there were 368 bookstores in New York in the 1950s, there are only 79 today.

Some argue the business is “aging out” and expect it to decline further or, as in the case of The Argosy Book Store, founded in 1925 by Louis Cohen and run today by his three daughters, it continues because the family held on to the midtown building.

On the positive side, hipster bibliophiles are growing in numbers and are more demographically diverse than their predecessors. They include as Pawn Stars regular Rebecca Romney, Kevin Young of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Caroline Schimmel, who specializes in books by women and hip-hop archivist and curator Syreeta Gates.

While the world of multimillion-dollar book auctions is remote from most of our experience, anyone who has got lost for a couple of hours in the stacks of an old-fashioned used bookstore will find something relatable here. Perhaps too much so — Young’s documentary is uncomfortably reminiscent of those teeming, badly labelled joints, where biography, literature, old magazine issues, obscure biographies and auction catalogues coexist in precarious piles.

The lack of clear identification of interview subjects and amorphous shape of the film can be frustrating. A segment on the history of book-burning, for example, feels gratuitous but, for the record, everyone in the film is against it.

The Booksellers. Directed by D.W. Young. With Fran Lebowitz, Susan Orlean, Gay Talese and others. Screening at Toronto’s TIFF Bell Lightbox March 11 and Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema March 13 through 26, Edmonton’s Metro Theatre March 27, and Calgary’s Globe Cinema April 3-9.