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by Laurie Allee
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| Click above to watch the film. |
Do you miss browsing used bookstore stacks?
I found the next best thing! The Booksellers, directed by D. W. Young, is a documentary film made especially for bookworms.
Antiquarian booksellers are a weird bunch. Part collector, part obsessive, part sleuth, part entrepreneur and totally, completely, ALL book nerd. The Booksellers is a fascinating peek inside a world populated with eccentrics, intellectuals, historians, sentimentalists and the keepers of a medium that is literally crumbling and turning to dust.
While I wish the film ventured beyond the East Coast-centered traditional -- nothing about the equally zealous comic book, hip-hop, manga, pulp and film script collectors, -- I adored getting an insider's glimpse at this dusty, dreamy book world.
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| Adam Weinberger gets lost in a library (Film still from The Booksellers) |
I also appreciated the diverse group of antiquarian book collectors featured in the film. If you think they're all old white guys with patches on their tweed jacket sleeves... think again. Sure, there are a lot of those guys, but you may be surprised at who else is avidly, passionately selling and collecting old books in the 21st Century...and who was a big part of its heyday in the mid 20th Century.
Watch D.W. Young and Peter Bolte discuss the film below:
