When film director A.B. Zax started telling people he was making a documentary about a bookshop, "I got a few blank stares and bemused smiles. Undoubtedly, they thought, 'well, that sounds like it might be kind of boring.' But they didn't know Matt Tannenbaum. And they didn't know the Bookstore in Lenox, Massachusetts, a shop that Matt has turned into a humble literary institution in the Berkshires."
Tannenbaum purchased the Bookstore in 1976, after working for a couple of years at the old Gotham Book Mart in Manhattan. I learned that and much more when I had the opportunity to get an early look at Zax's upcoming documentary Hello, Bookstore, which premieres at Film Forum in New York City April 29 (see more release details in media notes above).
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| Matt Tannenbaum | |
I love the subtle way the film captures specific qualities that make Tannenbaum a gifted bookseller: his intelligence, sense of humor, charm and warmth; his ability to seamlessly weave conversation, storytelling and handselling; the modesty of a longtime bookman who frankly admits in the film: "I'm not a businessman. I've always been doing it by the seat of my pants."
Having been a patron of the Bookstore for more than 10 years, Zax said he "had become enraptured by the way Matt holds court in the store, turning the art of selling books into a kind of performance.... Buying a book from Matt is not transactional. It's a portal to the ancient human ritual of sharing stories. In the age of Amazon and e-commerce, exploring this kind of connection became deeply moving to me."
Tannenbaum told me that Zax "first fell under the spell when I gave him a copy of a memoir I had put together back in 2009, My Years at The Gotham Book Mart.... I haven't watched the film for a couple of months now, but when I show the trailer to customers every once in awhile, I'm struck by the moment when Adam shoots me in mid-thought, as if I'm just realizing that 'I fell in love with writing....' "
It's a wonderful moment, during which Tannenbaum recalls getting out of the Navy and a buddy introducing him to authors like Jack Kerouac, Henry Miller and Frederick Exley: "I fell in love with writing, that's what happened. I fell in love with writing. So I understood somehow that this world of books was fascinating. It was completely different from my life. The world of the stories I found in books was so far away from mine. It was like [whispers] nobody else knew. I was the only one who knew what these stories were."
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| A.B. Zax | |
When Zax began shooting Hello, Bookstore in the fall of 2019, he "became a fly on the wall, chronicling this lost world, and hoping that somehow, what I am able to film might inspire more people to turn back to their own communities. We need bookstores. We need small businesses. We need people to turn away from their screens and into the windows of our towns. So much of the division in our country seems rooted in this loss. Filming before and during the Covid pandemic brought all of these feelings to the surface. Little did I realize that through the eyes of this little bookstore, I was filming the old world becoming the new."
Zax returned during the holidays, then came back in the spring and summer of 2020 "for extended periods, so you also see two periods of Covid with varying severity," he noted. "While editing, I chose to juxtapose these periods, creating chapters that ebb and flow almost seasonally. The prologue shows the store in the midst of Covid, then we jump back to fall 2019 to show the store as it was. From there, we get into Covid over the spring/summer of 2020, before going back to the holidays of 2019 before the pandemic. It then mostly stays in the present, except for the dream sequence, etc. This felt like the right way to handle the timeline, because it heightens the contrasts--the good times, the hard times and deepens the scenes in between."
He was still filming as the pandemic threatened the bookshop's survival, and when an outpouring of community support for a "Save The Bookstore" GoFundMe campaign came to the rescue. (No spoiler alert needed here, since we reported on the campaign.)
"I wanted to show what we've been missing, and more than that, what we've taken for granted," Zax observed. "It also really highlights the way Matt has to adapt--cracking jokes and selling books through the door. Even on the darkest days, when the fate of the bookstore was literally hanging by a thread, you see him reading Higglety Pigglety Pop to cheer himself up, or reciting the poem 'Dragonfly Days' to honor a departed friend. He leapt into the pandemic, turning it into a kind of ballet. A one-man band, taking orders on the phone, rummaging in the back for a recommendation, and trading stories at the door."
Hello, Bookstore will be available to watch soon. Tannenbaum is still at his station of choice, an all-purpose nook located by the front window of the Bookstore.
"A few years ago, I had dinner with David Silverstein, the man who started the Bookstore and owned it for just about 10 years," Tannenbaum said. "He told me that when people started referring to 'the Bookstore' as 'David's Bookstore' he knew it was time to get out. He wanted, he said, to do other things. And when he told me that I realized in a flash that after so many years 'the Bookstore" had become 'Matt's Bookstore.' I knew I didn't want to do anything else!"