THE BOOKSELLERS (2020)

Director(s): D. W. Young
Cast: Featuring Fran Lebowitz, Susan Orlean, Gay Talese and misc other authors and book collectors

Antiquarian booksellers are part scholar, part detective and part businessperson, and
their personalities and knowledge are as broad as the material they handle. They also play an underappreciated yet essential role in preserving history. THE BOOKSELLERS
takes viewers inside their small but fascinating world, populated by an assortment of
obsessives, intellects, eccentrics and dreamers.

Executive produced by Parker Posey, the film features interviews with some of the most
important dealers in the business, as well as prominent collectors, auctioneers, and
writers such as Fran Lebowitz, Susan Orlean, Kevin Young and Gay Talese. Both a
loving celebration of book culture and a serious exploration of the future of the book, the
film also examines technology’s impact on the trade, the importance of books as
physical objects, the decline of used and rare bookstores, collecting obsessions, and
the relentless hunt for the next great find.

And perhaps best of all, THE BOOKSELLERS offers a rare glimpse of many unique and
remarkable objects, including the most expensive book ever sold, Da Vinci’s The Codex
Leicester; handwritten Borges manuscripts; jeweled bindings; books bound in human
flesh; essential early hip-hop documents; accounts of polar expeditions published with
samples of real wooly mammoth fur; and many more.

 

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