Booksellers Try to Keep Their Industry’s Pages Turning

"The Booksellers"
Photo Credit: RottenTomatoes.com

*Although I've been catching up on some classic movies over the last few weeks ever since the movie theaters temporarily closed, I'm going to take a break from them every so often to dive into the indie films that have been made available in the Jacob Burns Film Center's virtual screening room.

With movie theaters being closed with the health crisis going on, I’ve been devouring books left and right.  Going to the movies and reading books are my two favorite past times, and if I can’t do the former, I’m going to do the latter.  Over the last seven weeks, I've been immersing myself in books at a rate that has made my love of reading the strongest that it has ever been.  Page after page I go, trying to read as much as I can before getting tired.  After racing through these books, I was thrilled to see a documentary that was available to stream, one that would explore the world of books.  This documentary is director D.W. Young’s "The Booksellers," an enthralling, intimate look into New York City’s independent bookstores and sellers of rare books.

The first few minutes are enough to get any bibliophile hooked, as we're brought into the bustling conference hall of the esteemed New York Book Fair.  With the camera gazing at the priceless books inside their display cases, we know that these booksellers aren't fooling around when it comes to their profession.  Their passion for books seems to be unparalleled from anyone outside their world, showing the care and enthusiasm that they put into preserving books that could be decades, even centuries old. 

After this, we're granted access to the offices, libraries, houses, storage garages, and bookshelves of several NYC booksellers who don't do anything less than astound you with their commitment to giving these works of art the respect that they, and their authors, deserve.  Although it could seem like the documentary interviews too many booksellers and might have worked a tad better had they just focused on a select few to go further into their stories (some booksellers are given more time than others), having this many book enthusiasts appear in the movie gives you a positive feeling of how the art of book collecting and selling could still be thriving in the years to come, so long as these individuals, and others, continue to emphasize the importance of keeping the voices within the cherished pages alive.

As we gain access into the lives of the booksellers, we’re also given the opportunity see the vast collections to which they’ve dedicated their lives.  With the loving views of their libraries, Young makes you want to climb the shelves, grab a book, read it, and then make you do it all over again.  You can get swept away by the shelves of volumes that have found the homes that they need, and it’s sights like these that not only absorb you into the lives of these booksellers, but also make you want to have your own book collection match the impressive sizes of the collections that are depicted in the film.

Almost halfway through the movie, there's a quote that's shown from children's author, Maurice Sendak that emphasizes how much a book can offer.  It goes, “There’s so much more to a book than just the reading.”  This is a quote that encapsulates what books mean to the individuals that this movie follows.  Although they love to read, they see books as more than just a way by which to pass the time, but also as a way of life and a method to preserve history and culture.

While the subject of print media vs. digital media might seem like it has been covered extensively, there's still some intrigue in exploring this topic from the point of view of these booksellers.  With many of the booksellers being from generations that saw print media thrive, those sellers feel more of a sting when it comes to print being pushed out by digital media because of how those sellers have dealt with print media for most of their lives, so there's a sentimental attachment to it.  With all of the work that the individuals in the film do to preserve books, we sense the importance of a book’s tangibility with how great it feels to flip through pages and view the essentialness of being able to have a book, a piece of art, in your hands.

Near the end of the film, there’s a quote from Jorge Luis Borges’ “The Library of Babel” that goes, “The library will endure; it is the universe.”  If “The Booksellers” is anything by which to go, the future of books could very well have countless more chapters.

Grade: A-