Thoughts on The Booksellers

     On Tubi, I watched The Booksellers, a 2019 documentary by D.W. Young, and executive produced by Parker Posey, about booksellers, rare book dealers, and archivists in New York City. The film mostly follows antiquarian and rare book dealers and their bookstores, as they collect and purchase books for large sums of money, having specific criteria like special autographs by the author (either to a fellow famous person or to a loved one in their life), an interesting dust jacket, or a prized first edition. They got their start working in used bookstores; following in their families' footsteps, or just falling into the career as nerdy collectors. 

    I found this film really fascinating, and as an archivist myself, I could relate to how much the book dealers and shop owners valued the archival history of the books, and wanting to preserve their legacies and support independent bookstores. As one person said, "We didn't call them independent bookstores back then, they were just bookstores."

    I did like when the film focused on people that weren't just the white middle-aged men who fit the stuffy, elitist book dealer stereotype, but spoke with Black archivists and librarians, like Kevin Young, a librarian at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem (who highlighted the James Baldwin archives at the library, like his personal notes on napkins or unfinished literary drafts), or Syreeta Gates, an archivist who collected hip-hop journalism from the 1990s, like from XXL and The Source, and, full disclosure, I briefly met a couple of times when I worked for the Center for Puerto Rican Studies in Harlem because she did some research work there as an archival fellow. Three sisters (Adina Cohen, Naomi Hample and Judith Lowry) run the Argosy Book Store, which is New York City's oldest independent bookstore, founded by their father Louis Cohen in 1925.

    The film felt very warm and cozy to watch, and I like watching people thrive in their fields nerding out over their passions, and seeing them in their bookstores and homes surrounded by books and having their own library system and figuring out what to do with their books after they die. I'm not as much of a collector, due to limited space and funds, nor am I interested in hunting for rare items like they are, like "digging for gold" as they would put it, but I can relate to the joy and enthusiasm that one would elicit from discovering these historical materials and maintaining them for posterity. It's a lovely movie, and I'm glad I checked it out.