Over the past 20 years the internet has irrevocably altered the trade. In the process of investigating, he meets and introduces a wealth of younger booksellers whose stories show that the business, despite the odds, is alive and kicking. His samples range from the sublime to the strange, from the Codex Leicester by Leonardo da Vinci bought by Bill Gates for $30.8m in 1994 (the equivalent of $53.2m in 2019) to a 19th-century photo album featuring hair from a woolly mammoth. Young, the film’s director, says he wanted to reflect this generational shift and capture the “expertise and legend of those pre-internet dealers while they still exist”. (Teenage jobs in second-hand bookstores turn into lifelong passions the daughters and sons of dealers slowly but surely follow them into the profession.) “After a month in Las Vegas, of all places, I knew this was what I wanted to do with my life,” says Rebecca Romney, who evaluates old books on “Pawn Stars”, a television show.įran Lebowitz, a writer, comedian and quintessential New Yorker, is a wise-cracking guide to the history of Book Row on Fourth Avenue, once lined with “little dusty Jewish men who were very irritated if you wanted to buy a book.” That heyday is long gone of 48 rare-book shops on Book Row only one remains, the venerable Strand Book Store. He, like many of the dealers profiled, joined the trade unintentionally. “My PhD is in 16th-century Spanish lyric poetry, which explains why I’m totally broke,” quips Saúl Roll in the opening scene. The book-collecting and -selling impulse animates an entertaining group of mostly self-deprecating mavericks who are a joy to follow through their groaning shelves. The film aims to celebrate the persistence of physical books, underscoring their value as irreplaceable containers of human knowledge, but it is not some elegiac portrait of a bygone world. By the film’s end, 90 minutes later, viewers have ambled through an entire and democratic world, as quirky and filled with unexpected gems as any cluttered bookshop.

“The Booksellers” opens at the New York Antiquarian Book Fair, the epicentre of a global trade in rarefied, expensive volumes, from Shakespeare’s Folios to first editions of “Don Quixote”. Yet as a delightful new documentary makes clear, today’s dealers and collectors are much livelier than the stereotype. Rare-book dealers sound like an obsessive breed you might have thought was long extinct (inevitably, the phrase conjures an image of a pipe-smoking gentleman in tweed). When they’re starting out, most collectors focus on used and vintage books that matter for personal reasons, sourced from thrift stores, used bookstores and other amateur enthusiasts.THEY ARE hunters and pack-rats, guardians of the unusual and obscure. Spencer said, “and I think that starts with someone inviting people in.” First Editions Everywhere “I want to see more people like me take an interest,” Mr. The group also introduced a paid internship program placing participants at member firms.

The group started a diversity initiative in 2020 to “encourage and promote the participation of L.G.B.T.Q.+, BIPOC, and underrepresented groups in the world of book collecting and the trade,” Susan Benne, the organization’s executive director, wrote in an email. The Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America, a trade group with more than 450 members, hopes to see that change. “If you walk around here, there’s no one behind a booth that looks like me,” said Mr.

A Georgetown Law graduate who became enamored with rare books while researching Frederick Douglass, he is working as an apprentice at DeWolfe & Wood Rare Books while he prepares to take the Massachusetts bar exam. Kendall Spencer, 30, also hopes to leave his mark on the antiquarian book world. But at 37, she represents a broad and growing cohort of young collectors who are coming to the trade from many walks of life just across the aisle, Luke Pascal, a 30-year-old former restaurateur, was presiding over a case of letters by Abraham Lincoln and George Washington. Romney is an established seller known to “Pawn Stars” fans as the show’s rare books expert. “It shows a life lived through books,” she said. Romney’s company, Type Punch Matrix, near Washington, D.C., is in talks to sell as a unit for $135,000. Winehouse’s 220-book collection, which Ms. “And it’s right next to someone else’s art that she was consuming while creating something new.” The Ginsberg text is the centerpiece of Ms. She did so not to recite from its pages but to show off the writing in the margins.Īmy Winehouse had puzzled out lyrics to an unrecorded song alongside Ginsberg’s lines. Late last month, during the New York International Antiquarian Book Fair at the Park Avenue Armory, Rebecca Romney withdrew a copy of “Howl, Kaddish, and Other Poems,” by Allen Ginsberg from her booth’s display case.

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