The Book­sellers

In my stu­dent days, I worked for a year at a used book­store on a small street in Madrid where all the shops, bar a design agency and a café, were rare book­sellers. All the book­sellers were friend­ly with one anoth­er, and would come in often into the shop try­ing to sniff out some inter­est­ing rar­i­ty who’s val­ue we might not have been able to spot.

So you can imag­ine my excite­ment when DW Young’s doc­u­men­tary about this rare, fas­ci­nat­ing breed of trea­sure hunter land­ed in my inbox. The Book­sellers doesn’t focus so much on the dif­fer­ent per­son­al­i­ties and quirks of the col­lec­tors as it does on try­ing to find what makes rare book­sellers tick, and unearthing the pol­i­tics that make up the very par­tic­u­lar New York book scene.

The film is nar­rat­ed and exec­u­tive pro­duced by Park­er Posey (the star of icon­ic librar­i­an movie Par­ty Girl), who became involved with the project as she was a reg­u­lar at one of the bookstores.

We meet Dave Bergman, who can bare­ly move in his apart­ment, crammed as it is with antique books from floor to ceil­ing; then there’s sis­ters Adi­na Cohen, Nao­mi Ham­ple and Judith Lowry, who took over the fam­i­ly busi­ness of Argosy Book Store (and who total­ly demand a book­shop-set TV series to be based on them); and Rebec­ca Rom­ney, who habit­u­al­ly nerds out about books on Pawn Stars and runs her own rare books firm.

While it paints a pic­ture of the book scene in New York (includ­ing wit­ty con­tri­bu­tions by leg­endary com­men­ta­tors like Fran Lebowitz and Gay Talese), the most intrigu­ing thing about the film is how it cen­tres what makes a col­lec­tor. With the hunt for a rare edi­tion is trans­form­ing because of the online mar­ket and new voic­es com­ing onto the scene, with some peo­ple los­ing inter­est as the inter­net takes away the roman­tic, scav­enger-like aspects of it.

The film does a lot to under­line the ingrained sex­ism in this spe­cial­ist world of rar­i­ties, first edi­tions and spe­cial­ist knowl­edge. Female and Black book­sellers talk about the lack not of rep­re­sen­ta­tion in the pro­fes­sion, but of the impor­tance of their work as a form of conservation.

The inher­ent bias­es that exist with that space are brought to the fore­front, with sto­ries of women book deal­ers not being tak­en seri­ous­ly, or not being cred­it­ed for their work. The bias­es can man­i­fest itself most­ly in the con­tent that’s being col­lect­ed, because the act of col­lect­ing some­thing is giv­ing those items and those per­spec­tives val­ue. As Young puts it, ​“Rare book deal­ers and col­lec­tors play a fun­da­men­tal role in pre­serv­ing history.”

Like Syree­ta Gates, who began col­lect­ing ​’90s hip hop mag­a­zines while try­ing to find an arti­cle that hadn’t been digi­tised any­where. That mag­a­zine became a col­lec­tion, and she in turn became an archivist of hip hop cul­ture. Or Heather O’Donell, own­er of Hon­ey & Wax Book­sellers and founder of the Hon­ey & Wax Book Col­lect­ing Prize, which encour­ages young women to ​“pay atten­tion to the books that fas­ci­nate them, even if they’re not yet sure why.”

“The hunt” may be the dri­ving force of the book­sellers, but the film shows rare book­selling evolv­ing into a form of cura­tor­ship – and that being the key of its evo­lu­tion, sur­vival and acces­si­bil­i­ty. Any­one who is inter­est­ed in a par­tic­u­lar sub­ject area can become a col­lec­tor. The most inter­est­ing col­lec­tors, the film posits, are peo­ple who see some­thing oth­ers don’t.