Appropriately executive produced by Party Girl screen librarian Parker Posey, D.W. Young’s new documentary takes us on a lively, if rambling, insider’s tour of the rarified world of rare book dealers and bookstores.

It opens at the annual Antiquarian Book Fair at New York City’s Park Avenue Armory, where an original edition of Miguel Cervantes’s Don Quixote is valued at $20,000 while a first edition of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novel Casino Royale goes for $150,000. In this profession, the book is a fetish artifact, valued more for its physical qualities (a dust jacket in pristine condition can add thousands of dollars to the price) and rarity than its content.

Eccentric and idiosyncratic personalities abound. Dealer Dave Bergman keeps his stock of oversized natural history and paleontological volumes in a cramped, crowded Upper West Side apartment. One title is so heavy he no longer carries it to shows. Another seller is not afraid to handle a book bound in human skin, noting that “the more uncomfortable a manuscript makes another dealer, the more it appeals to me.”

And then there are collectors like Caroline Schimmel, who over the years has built a major collection dedicated to women writers, and Priceline.com founder Jay Walker, who owns one of the largest private libraries in the world, dedicated to the “human imagination.” “If you are a collector, you are such an obsessive person,” says Schimmel.

While some book dealers transitioned from academia to go into the business, Nancy Bass Wyden inherited Strand Books from her father, Fred Bass. But with the internet and rising rents, it’s a struggle to keep a family legacy going. In the 1950s, there were 358 bookstores in New York City, and now about 79 remain. Strand Books, established in 1929, and the legendary Argosy Book Store, founded in 1925 by Louis Cohen and run today by his daughters Adina Cohen, Naomi Hample, and Judith Lowry, owe their continued existence partially to the fact that their proprietors also own the buildings in which the stores are located. The Cohen family continues to turn down many offers for their shop’s Midtown Manhattan building.

The film also reveals how the book trade from its early days became—and remains mostly—the domain of wealthy, white men. Pioneering book dealer A. S. W. Rosenbach was ruthless in outbidding competitors to serve such clients as J. P. Morgan, but there were outliers as well. Dealer-collectors Leona Rosenberg and Madeleine B. Stern, partners in business and in life, uncovered Louisa B. Alcott’s hidden pseudonym when she was writing pulp novels. But sadly, for years they were denied membership in the prestigious Grolier Club, despite their bibliophilic accomplishments, because of their gender.

Director Young touches briefly on the profession’s future as its current dealers’ age. For some, the outlook is pessimistic. Bibi Mohamed, a noted dealer in leather-bound books, is resigned to shutting down her business when the time comes because of her children’s disinterest in going into the trade. But hope comes in the guise of Pawn Stars regular Rebecca Romney, spreading the love of rare books on reality TV, and cutting edge dealer Arthur Fournier, working with collectors of color like Syreeta Gates to uncover and preserve hip hop and other African American materials.

If this entertaining documentary has one major flaw, it is the failure to identify with captions the many talking heads. For literary groupies, Susan Orlean, Fran Lebowitz, and Gay Talese are easy to spot, but who the heck is the guy discussing his collection dedicated to the human imagination, and where the hell is his fantastic library? Most frustrated viewers aren’t going to wait for the closing credits.

The Booksellers screened at this year’s New York Film Festival.