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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

‘The Booksellers’: Collecting, selling … but reading?

Dan Webster

Movie review“The Booksellers,” directed by D.W. Young (streaming through the Magic Lantern Theater)

A couple of decades ago, when I was working as a features writer for The Spokesman-Review, I arranged to meet Michael Powell, owner of Portland’s Powell’s Books.

I’d visited Powell’s a number of times and was in awe of the place. As someone who loves books, and to this day has a dozen boxes of them lining his hallway because there’s no place to put them anywhere else in his house, I was excited to meet the owner of one of the best bookstores I had ever had the pleasure to discover.

The excitement wafted away pretty quickly.

Maybe it was the fact that I was from Spokane. Even then, Portlanders – like residents of Seattle – considered Spokane, for want of a better word, inconsequential.

Maybe it was because he was busy and didn’t want to be bothered by yet another book-loving newspaper reporter who harbored fantasies about how cool it would be to sell books for a living.

Maybe it was because he was having a bad day.

Whatever the reason, Powell was initially polite but increasingly abrupt and eventually almost patronizing. He answered my questions, though it was clear that he’d heard them all before and wasn’t much interested in indulging me.

What I remember most of all was his response to my juvenile, wide-eyed comment – and I was being serious – about how satisfying it must be for him to run a bookstore. He looked at me without a hint of a smile.

“Would you ask that same question of a guy who runs a plumbing store?” he said, clearly ready to end the interview. “It’s a business. Selling books is a business.”

I recalled that uncomfortable interview as I watched the documentary film “The Booksellers,” which emphasizes repeatedly throughout its 99-minute running time the same message that Powell was telling me that day. The film, directed by D.W. Young, is one of several offerings that can be streamed through the Magic Lantern Theater.

Oh, there can be passion involved in selling books. Several of the people that director Young talks to, from the celebrity author Fran Lebowitz to a number of New York-based booksellers and collectors, have spent their lives and careers pursuing, buying and selling books. All, in one way or another, are associated with the New York International Antiquarian Book Fair, the annual event around which Young shapes his film.

Young gets them talking about the ins and outs of the business, from book care (carefully cleaning leather covers once a year) to the range of extremely rare items (one collector shows us a book containing real patches of mammoth hair). We learn of the guy who spent a $1.5 million on his apartment’s bookshelves just so they could handle the extra weight of his expanding collection, and of another guy whose personal library is as eclectic (he arranges the books by size, not topic) as it is effetely artistic (it’s set up to look like something designed by the imaginative artist M.C. Escher). And so on.

Young talks to more than guys, of course, though everyone – including the three sisters who run the city’s six-story Argosy Bookstore – makes it clear that the bookselling/collecting business always has been dominated mainly by tweed-wearing, pipe-smoking men. And, at times, the conversations run a bit far from actual books (one of the women interviewed owns a collection of magazines about the beginnings of hip-hop, while others collect various kinds of bric-a-brac such as hats and even, in one case, a taxidermied zebra).

But throughout the movie, Young never mentions the environmental impact of book publishing. In fact, those he interviews for the most part decry the potential (and entirely theoretical) death of the printed page in favor of digital readers. And as you might imagine, at least some even feel that computers and the Internet have ruined everything.

Not that they can’t make a selfish case. Online sources such as Amazon.com have clearly cut into the bricks-and-mortar bookselling business. “In the 1950s, there were 368 bookstores in New York City,” one of Young’s subjects says. “Today, I went and counted – there are 79.” 

More surprising, though, the activity that most of us associate with books, which is to read them, is given only a bare mention. The joy and passion of most of those whom Young interviews is reserved for the hunt for a rare book, the pride of ownership and the challenge of, say, a book auction (where a Leonardo Da Vinci manuscript might go for, hmmmm, $30 million?).

As one says, he can spend 20 years looking for a particular book, finally find it, purchase it – then put it on a shelf and forget it.

Only Leibowitz, a writer as well as a collector, shows a reader’s kind of love for the books she owns. So much so that she still resents the fact that she once loaned a book to the late David Bowie.

“He never returned it,” she says.

I understand her pain. Even if the likes of Michael Powell may not.