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Then there are the merits of dust jackets, or the market's mercurial desires when it comes to inscriptions.

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He opens the door to inquiry about why we are so fascinated by a writer's process, and why we believe that ephemera like scribbles on cocktail napkins can crack open the mysteries of creativity, but it's never shoved more than a few inches open. Glenn Horowitz, who has dealt with some of the most rarified archives (Nabokov, Dylan, Marquez, and more), would be a fascinating subject in his own right. The legacy of the old Fourth Street booksellers disappears from view during a lengthy digression about academic collections of author archives.

A procession of fascinating, quirky, and uniquely New York figures (including, of course, the inimitable Fran Lebowitz) recount both the history and the industry behind these joyous pursuit, and it's a giddy compendium of interlocking and often contrary takes.īut fascinating as every moment is, there's a nagging question of what The Booksellers is about. These are not your standard 'five for a buck' paperback resellers (no disrespect to their essential cultural services) but the high-end antiquarian dealers of New York, the kind who make as much money from exclusive book fairs and auction houses as they do from letting customers peruse their endless firetrap shelves, so narrowly constructed that you have to breathe in to pull an early National Geographic out into the aisle. Young, the hands through which these artifacts pass. Or rather, as they are portrayed by documentarian D.W. The Booksellers looks not at the buyer, but the vendor. It's finding a first edition with an uncut page. It's the smell, the way a book feels in your hand, how a yellowing page gives a warm glow to text that a new edition, with its crisp white pages, can never duplicate. It's in being in a book store and rifling through shelves and cabinets and rotating stands. The greatest pleasure of the bibliophile is not reading, but browsing.