The Booksellers

The first film at the cinema in 106 days was, again, thanks to the wonderful folk at Luna Cinemas in Leederville. The Booksellers is a documentary, directed by D.W. Young, about the seismically shifting world of antique book dealers. Set mostly in New York, it centres on the annual New York International Antiquarian Book Fair, which is filled with literary curios and weirdos of the highest order. It starts at this fair and then expands out to take up the stories of various sellers and collectors, each one on their own thread, until they converge again at the fair and a satisfying 'round table' meeting of some of the dealers.



There's a guy called Dave, who comes across as slightly fatalistic about his lot in life. There are three sisters (above) who own a multi-storey bookstore, The Argosy in Manhattan. An independent appraiser called Stephen, who started at Christie's of London in the 1960s. And probably the pick for me, noted author and humourist, Fran Lebowitz (left), whose stories of old bookshops and owners are wryly delivered.

But some of the oddest characters are Jay, who has created the one of the coolest libraries you'll see (right), Justin, who looks like he's actually ripped himself out of one of his children's books, and Henry (below), a dude who's too hard to describe in words. Another fella told a story of how a friend of his cried at seeing an old copy of Don Quixote but cried more when he saw that an old Ian Fleming Bond was worth more money!

The film deviates from these folk occasionally to look at different angles connected to the industry; the historical under-representation of women and black people, the issue of archiving, the lack of a younger subset of dealers in the game, and the threat from the Internet on books in general. One possible mooted solution to this is the idea of buying books as collectors' items, similar to the current existence of vinyl records. Me, I still love the smell of a new book.




The Booksellers opens at the Luna and Windsor cinemas from July 2nd.


See also:

I know it's not a film but Black Books (2000-2004), created by Dylan Moran and Graham Linehan, is brilliant and Jean-Jacques Annaud's The Name of the Rose (1986) has a bit to do with antique books.