Hello, Bookstore

“Hello, bookstore,” is how Matthew Tannenbaum has answered the phone at his Lenox, Massachusetts independent shop every day since 1976. Charming, avuncular, eccentric, relaxed: a man surrounded by great literature, friendly neighbours, and tree-lined streets in a town where time seems to have stood still. A.B. Zax captures the sensibility of the dedicated reader for whom a bookstore is a tiny piece of paradise, a Brigadoon where one savours great words and ideas merely by browsing its wares. Peppered with passages from My Ántonia (Willa Cather), Beautiful Losers (Leonard Cohen), The Human Stain (Philip Roth), Henry V (William Shakespeare), and poetry by Billy Collins, Robert Frost, and Edna St. Vincent Millay, this lyrical documentary is a valentine to human creativity, of both the literary and entrepreneurial kind. When the Covid epidemic renders bookstores off-limits, Tannenbaum needs to regroup, and Zax’s story becomes only more inspiring.