Matthew Tannenbaum in Hello, Bookstore (Greenwich Entertainment)

First-time filmmaker A.B. Zax’s Hello, Bookstore is a tender valentine to a beloved bookshop in Lenox, Massachusetts, and its owner, the charming, chatty, and avuncular Matthew Tannenbaum, who for over 40 years has been greeting his phone customers with “Hello, Bookstore.” When filming began in the fall of 2019, little did the director and subject anticipate the global pandemic looming ahead that would dramatically impact the shop and its local community.

Subtitled “A Film in Chapters,” the documentary opens with a prologue set in spring 2020. In black-and-white footage, Tannenbaum tries to conduct business with masked customers through a glass door. “Curbside only. I don’t want people in here,” he tells them. “You can browse on the website.” He even turns regulars away. It’s an awkward dance as he jots down shouted credit card numbers and tells customers to step away from the door as he places their purchases outside.

The next chapter flashes back to the previous fall as customers browse the store’s bounteous shelves or sit in the cozy Get Lit wine bar, nursing a Merlot while Tannenbaum regales them with colorful stories from his long bookselling career. The camera follows Tannenbaum as he rearranges books on a display table or hands a wand to a little girl who is a big Harry Potter fan or reads a snippet from Maurice Sendak’s Higglety Pigglety Pop! His younger daughter Sophie, who stops by to bring her father lunch, admits she likes to come into the store anonymously and watch his interactions with customers. “He’s got time for everyone.”

Little biographical details are also shared. Tannenbaum fell in love with writing after a friend introduced him to the works of Henry Miller. He says he learned the book trade “viscerally” while working at Manhattan’s legendary Gotham Book Mart in the 1970s and bought the Lenox bookshop on April 1, 1976, just 10 days before his 30th birthday.

The following chapters alternate between 2019 and the summer of 2020 as Tannenbaum struggles to keep the straightforwardly named Bookstore going. While many of the other Lenox businesses have reopened for in-person shopping, Tannenbaum insists on curbside service only. In addition to his age as a risk factor, he is also an expectant grandfather as a visit by his older daughter Shawnee reveals. Unfortunately, he quickly learns that curbside service is not a sustainable business model as his sales decline from their prepandemic levels.

“I’m not a businessman,” Tannenbaum acknowledges. “I have been doing this by the seat of my pants.” But the pandemic has hit his store hard. Looking at the weekly numbers, he notes the figures would have made a good day in summers past. He is now in debt to Simon & Schuster, but has no money to pay the publisher. His only option is to raise money from his local community through a GoFundMe campaign.

Accompanied by Jeffrey Lubin’s nostalgic, romantic score that mixes folk tunes with classical pieces, Zax’s elegant camera work captures the beauty of New England light, bathing the bookshop’s inventory in a glow of golden sunlight, but there is a hermetic quality to the film, as if the director was making it only for insiders. Aside from exterior shots of the Bookstore on Housatonic Street, there is no footage of the town of Lenox or of the neighboring Berkshires to give viewers unfamiliar with the area a sense of the community the shop serves. A little more context about the store and its staff would have been helpful: Did Tannenbaum lay off employees during the shutdown?

Despite these little annoyances, Zax’s film beautifully reveals how one man’s lifetime passion touches and shapes a community. “I see what you do,” Tannenbaum recalls what a man once told him. “You sit in that chair surrounded by the things you love most in the world and you talk to people. And the only time you get interrupted is when someone wants to give you money.” A perfect companion to 2019’s The Booksellers about the antiquarian book trade, this release will delight lovers of books and quirky, independent bookshops. Be sure to wait for the reading list in the credits.