![]() In one sequence, the camera follows a dealer on a scouting trip to a stunningly decrepit apartment off Central Park West belonging to a recently deceased academic. Escher-inspired Library of the History of Human Imagination (complete with floating platforms and glass-paneled bridges) or the vast warehouse of the dealer James Cummins, crammed with 300,000-plus books - New Jersey’s answer to Jorge Luis Borges’s infinite Library of Babel.Īnd then there are the film’s more alarming settings. Still, it’s nothing compared with some of the jaw-dropping spaces the documentary peeks into, like the collector Jay Walker’s M.C. Sanctuary, housed in an unassuming midcentury office overlooking a tony stretch of Madison Avenue (and open by appointment only), is suitably atmospheric, particularly as the late afternoon light filters in. A few years ago, he had a brush with fame, or at least the antiquarian bookseller’s version of it, when he and a colleague announced the discovery of an elaborately annotated 1580 dictionary they hypothesized might have belonged to Shakespeare (a claim that has been met with respectful skepticism). Wechsler, 52, got into the business about 30 years ago, after a post-college stint at Second Story Books outside Washington. “They perform a core function of preservation.” “Booksellers are providing something beyond the mercantile,” Young said. If there’s an underlying bass note, it’s the way the profession is driven by equal parts commerce, scholarship and sheer love. The film’s approach is immersive, treating its subjects - mainly booksellers, but also collectors, auctioneers, curators and others up and down the trade’s food chain - less as talking heads than as “jazz soloists,” as Young put it, offering variations on recurring themes. “If we didn’t record their contributions, they might not be around much longer.” “This was the generation that really made their mark before the internet,” Wechsler said. (Stone, the story goes, was once considered to replace Brian Jones in the Rolling Stones but chose a life of digging through crates of books instead.) More From the Special Section: Museums, galleries and auction houses are opening their doors wider than ever to new artists, new concepts and new traditions.īy the time they began working on it a few years later, the project had taken on greater urgency, as more figures from their imagined dream cast of characters - like Martin Stone, the British rock guitarist turned book scout - died.A Cultural Correction: After removing all references to Columbus from its collections the Denver Art Museum has embraced a new exhibition on Latin American art.And the La Brea Tar Pits & Museum is working to engage visitors about the realities of climate change. New and Old : In California, museums are celebrating and embracing Latino and Chicano art and artists.A Tribute to Black Artists: Four museums across the country are featuring exhibitions this fall that recognize the work of African and African American artists, signaling a change in attitude - and priorities.Bigger and Better : While the Covid-19 pandemic forced museums to close for months, cut staff and reduce expenses, several of them have nevertheless moved forward on ambitious renovations or new buildings. ![]() “It’s just an amazingly visually rich experience.” Young, the film’s director, said last week while sitting in a the suitably book-crammed offices of Sanctuary Books, a rare-book outfit a few blocks from the armory. “Going in, you might imagine it’s a bunch of old brown spines, but it’s completely the opposite,” D.W. One veteran dealer interviewed in the early scenes of “The Booksellers,” a documentary opening Friday, just time for this year’s fair, calls it “a roller-coaster ride between tedium and great bits of commerce and discoveries.”įor the less jaded first-time visitor, it can also be an overwhelming explosion of stimulation. It’s a kind of Woodstock for the ultra-bookish, where museum-like displays of stunningly bound 16th-century volumes and illuminated manuscripts are surrounded by booths specializing in rare maps, historical documents, vintage crime novels, counterculture ephemera and just about anything else, as long as it’s (mostly) on paper. The New York International Antiquarian Book Fair, held every March at the Park Avenue Armory in Manhattan, is the world’s premier gathering of buyers, sellers and lovers of rare books.
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