“I write something in a computer file and in five years it has become obsolete and I cannot read it, while a five hundred year old book does not pose the slightest problem for me”, says one of the interviewees in the film New York Booksellers , setting the tone. By viewing it, we confirm that, even in these times of revolution in reading habits, there is something in the “book object”, and even more so in the “old book”, and even more in the “rare and highly sought after book”, which captures unquestionably.
New York exhales the distinctive perfume of bookstores. Their number may have dropped – eighty today compared to nearly 400 in the 1950s – but the mark remains. The booksellers (2019), directed by documentary maker DW Young and produced by actress Parker Posey, delves into the world of so-called antiquarian booksellers, which is not the same as old-fashioned booksellers, because they work with bibliophile pieces, although often both categories overlap.
The film starts at the New York Antiquarian Book Fair in 2017 and from there it moves us to the spaces of the protagonists. Hardwood abounds, velvet on the wall, we often see cats prowling its hallways. The shelves, always variegated with sophisticated bindings. A bookseller shows a volume bought fifteen years ago: “It was so heavy that I no longer wanted to move it,” he declares. The owner of the Walker Library of Human Imagination has structured his premises as if it were an Escher engraving, with crisscrossing staircases and impossible perspectives.
Poster for the film ‘Libreros de Nueva York’ (‘The booksellers’).
The Walker Library of Human Imagination is like an Escher print, with crisscrossing stairs and impossible perspectives
Sisters Naomi, Judith and Adina run the legendary Argosy on 59th Street, inherited from their parents, Ruth Shevin and Louis Cohen. They guard engravings, manuscripts and autographs. They recognize that the business is not very profitable, but …. “We pay for the privilege of working here”, they justify themselves.
A young bookseller, Bibi, recalls that when she found a complete edition of Balzac on sale for $ 200, she screamed, “This is mine!”
Fran Lebowitz remembers the old bookstores of his youth where, when someone came to buy, the owner would get angry, because what he really liked was to sit and read his own funds without being disturbed. Lebowitz is the funniest of the authors summoned by DW Young (Gay Talese and Susan Orlean also appear).
We come across surprising stories: a book that keeps a mammoth hair; another, bound with human skin. An expert in demonology and fetishism appears. In certain establishments and owners we detect disorder, a somewhat decadent tone, even freakiness. But the claim to “instill in the neophyte the wonders of the book as an object” abounds.
One veteran recalls that classic antiquarian booksellers wore tweed jackets with elbow patches and smoked pipes; today the union embraces feminist demands, multiculturalism and the most alternative production. In the last ten years, of course, the profession has changed radically as a result of online shopping.
Writer Fran Lebowitz is one of those interviewed.
From a tribute to pioneering booksellers in the 1940s, Leona Rostenberg and Madeleine Stern, we moved to the Grolier Bibliophilia Club, which continues to bring together the most prominent figures in the field at 47 East 60th Street. The profession of the New York antiquarian bookseller has its historical milestone in the auction where Bill Gates paid $ 28 million for a Leonardo manuscript. And in the chapter on records, James Cummings keeps 300,000 volumes in three industrial warehouses, in what seems like a direct nod to the Carlos Ruiz Zafón Cemetery.
Some great phrases that slip into the film: “When I see a book in the trash, it is as if I saw a human head.” “The role is a psychic conductor and when I find something interesting I feel a discharge.” “If you mention the word Kindle to a bookseller, it gives him a chill.” “You find a rarity and it’s like an orgasm, but then you park it on the shelf.”
“The nightmare of a bookseller – it is concluded – is not knowing what will happen to his books when he has died.” But possibly all those that appear agree on a much simpler concept: “Books are what make us human.”
–
