The Quarantine Stream: ‘The Booksellers’ Explores The Rare Book Business In New York City
By Ben Pearson/Feb. 22, 2021 8:00 am EST
The biggest downside of this doc, though, was that it raised a lot of interesting ideas but rarely followed through on them in a satisfying way. Take two moments in the trailer as example: when the prospective bookstore owners talk about how their soon-to-open shop will engage with the neighborhood in a way that larger bookstores never did, and when the young female bookseller talks about how older colleagues express a doom-and-gloom outlook about the future of the industry but she counters by excitedly saying she has tons of ideas. The Booksellers doesn’t follow through on either of those moments – we never see or learn exactly how that shop will engage with its community, and we never get to hear any of the ideas that the woman seemed so excited about. The film also finally gets around to addressing the idea of opening up this historically white and male-dominated community to more diverse audiences and sellers, but while some lip service is paid to that topic, I didn’t think it offered enough concrete steps about how anyone was actually going to achieve that goal.
Still, the film has its moments (I appreciated the history of “Book Row” and a digression about the value of book jackets), and there are enough #bookporn shots to make it worth a watch for devoted bibliophiles. If absolutely nothing else, it should make you want to set aside some time to read a really good book.
