DOCUMENTARY

PETE CROATTO

wWHETHER YOU’RE A JOURNALIST, a documentarian, or a photographer, style comes from a mastery of fundamentals and facts. The Booksellers, a rudderless exploration of New York City’s dwindling community of antiquarian booksellers, shows a deficit of both. There is much to hold our interest: passionate subjects, a forgotten side of New York City’s history, apartments and warehouses creaking with wobbly skyscrapers of paper and glue and obsession. Director D.W. Young captures the scenes and the emotions with a casual air, but his inability to grasp the basics blunts the passion of his subjects.

Young profiles a crop of these booksellers, most of whom are older and don’t sugarcoat their profession’s wobbly future. The Internet has eliminated the need for these dealers, and the printed word dwindles in value daily. But hope remains. There’s a younger crowd, led by Rebecca Romney—you might remember her from History Channel’s Pawn Stars—and a growing need to chronicle and categorize hip-hop’s print age. The modern era of collectible books is upon us.

The Booksellers

What form that takes or how long it will last is anyone’s guess.

That uncertainty is perhaps why Young veers from vignettes of booksellers to projections for the future to history of the New York City scene to quirks of the trade (high-priced auctions; the value of author archives). These sidebars sputter to a conclusion.

There’s a desperate need for an editor—the Ben Bradlee kind, not the Thelma Schoomaker kind—to pare down the scope and find a digestible story. An unwillingness to engage in journalism’s basic tenets—asking questions that can’t be answered “yes” or “no,” providing background, killing your darlings—plagues more than a few documentaries but infests The Booksellers. Young can’t capture basic facts that would provide the narrative with emotional heft, like how a bookseller survives, let alone thrives. Dave Bergman’s tiny apartment is a maze of obscure, dusty titles. I kept wondering how he affords to live this way, more so after we learn he plays for several softball teams throughout the city. Or how bookseller Jim Cummins, who has three

warehouses in Jersey teeming with books and various ephemera, maintains such an operation. It would have been nice to know their roles in this “horrible business.” Or their full names, which I found by visiting the film’s website.

The lack of context is a mosquito bite that slowly and assuredly festers into a full-body annoyance. Main characters, or at least someone whom viewers can rally around, are non-existent. Ditto a reference point, like the New York International Antiquarian Book Fair, to give the story form and purpose. Young seems disinterested in justifying why we should stick around beyond good intentions. Yes, the subjects are earnest and eloquent and likable, people compelled to follow a passion that diminishes in relevance as another adult orphan places first-edition gems on eBay. That Young has eliminated an entry point for the audience, isolates those unfamiliar with a precious, personal profession. In an unintentional and aggravating way, Caruso has provided a commentary on the insular appeal of rare books. The die-hards will nod in agreement; everyone else, I fear, will nod off. [NR] n