An average person’s notion of a book collector, we’re told in director D.W. Young’s delightful documentary — available via Amazon Prime — is a middle-aged (or older) man in a tweed jacket with elbow patches, and a pipe. And a glass of sherry.
Although some of the individuals profiled and quoted in this film fit that description, an equal number do not; indeed, one of the savviest next-gen rare book dealers is Rebecca Romney, a go-to expert on TV’s Pawn Stars, who has been in the trade since 2007.
Argosy Books — co-owned by, from left, Adina Cohen, Naomi Hample and Judith
Lowry — is one of the few original bookstores remaining in New York City, from a
time when dozens of similar outlets, on Fourth Avenue alone, prompted a section of
that street to be called "Book Row."
Like everybody else here, she’s enthusiastic and impressively articulate … and perhaps just a trifle unconventional. It goes with the territory.
Aside from Romney and a few other geographical outliers, Young’s film spends most of its time in New York’s book world, with its assortment of obsessives, intellects, eccentrics and dreamers. The tone and atmosphere are unapologetically Big Apple, but the charm of Young’s approach is the ease with which he slips us into this scene.
This film was made by book people, for book people; folks who use their dictionaries as door stops probably won’t last 10 minutes. But those of us who love walking into a home with a wall of stuffed floor-to-ceiling shelves, and who always smile at the faintest whiff of that characteristic “old book smell,” are certain to enjoy this alternately fascinating and whimsical 99-minute journey.
Actually, anybody with a collector’s mentality likely will see themselves in many of these folks.
“The world is divided into people who collect things,” one dealer observes, “and people who don’t know what the hell these people are doing, collecting things. [They think] if you’re a collector, you’re just a sick, obsessive-compulsive person who would sell your grandmother to buy something you really like.”
(Which could be true, in a few cases.)
The film opens at the Park Avenue Armory’s annual Antiquarian Book Fair, the world’s largest event of its type, where more than 200 American and international dealers display a massive assortment of rare books, maps, manuscripts and ephemera in the realms of literature, art, medicine, photography, autographs, first editions and, well, honestly, I couldn’t keep track. Cinematographer Peter Bolte’s overhead view of the place is breathtaking.
It’s somewhat appropriate that the massive building’s large clock long ago stopped working; as with Las Vegas casinos, the Book Fair evades any acknowledgment of time’s passage.
