For Matt Tannenbaum’s bookstore in Lenox, Massachusetts – simply known as The Bookstore – the Covid-19 pandemic was transformational, but not in the way you might think. When the lockdowns were imposed, business quickly came to a near standstill, with Tannenbaum’s weekly sales amounting to what a good day might have been pre-Covid. The situation grew dire, and then he decided to try raising money through the popular donation platform GoFundMe. Very suddenly, everything changed.
Tannenbaum’s GoFundMe didn’t just meet its target – staggeringly, it actually doubled its $60,000 goal in just two days of operations, instantly changing The Bookstore from a business that had long operated in the red to one that was flush with cash reserves. Speaking on the remarkable upwelling of community support, Tannanbaum told me, “I knew it was there, because people had been telling me for years how much they cared about the store. It was just delight squared.”
This sudden infusion of cash turned Tannenbaum into a completely different kind of small business owner than he had been before Covid. “I never had money before in my life,” he said. “I can actually get out of debt now. I have a backup now. I can place larger orders and have more stock and be more successful as a bookseller.” Laughing, he concluded, “So I learned, after three-quarters of a century of being alive, that if you have money you can make money.”
Film-maker Adam Zax happened to be in the middle of shooting a multi-year documentary about his friend Tannenbaum and The Bookstore when these remarkable events transpired. It is to the credit of Zax and his movie, Hello, Bookstore (the name comes from Tannenbaum’s greeting when he answers the phone), that he chooses not to let this Cinderella moment dominate but instead lets it be just one panel in a much larger collage that captures the feel and flow of the life of this independent bookstore. The resultant movie is an offbeat, extremely atmospheric look at what longstanding small businesses and entrepreneurs like Tannenbaum mean to the communities that surround them.
Taking his cues from documentarians like Frederick Wiseman and the Maysles brothers, Zax is far more concerned with ambience and texture than plotting or making a point. Hello, Bookstore moves slowly, encompassing multitudes as innumerable small moments collect around its subject. “I’ve always loved fly on the wall documentaries,” Zax told me. “I’ve never really responded to the talking head style of movies. I don’t want to hammer in things, I want there to be a sense of discovery while you’re watching it. With the rhythm of [Hello, Bookstore], I took my cue from the store. I thought that, if we can get the atmosphere right, the contours of the story will figure out where they need to go. I wanted it to be cozy and relaxing, like you’re in a bookstore.”
Hello, Bookstore does indeed succeed in capturing the quiet, calming feel of being in a great independent bookstore. Zax tends to use lengthy, static shots that give each scene time to slowly develop, leisurely finding their purpose. Often the action is around Tannenbaum speaking to longtime patrons of The Bookstore or his two adult daughters; we also frequently see him engaging in a favored pastime: evangelizing for great literature by reading aloud passages to whomever will listen. Although the effect of Zax’s approach can be at first jarring, confounding a viewer’s expectations, over time the unusual flow of the movie becomes more and more compelling, its rhythms more familiar and lulling.
Pre-pandemic footage of Tannenbaum’s bookstore shows a bustling, quirky business complete with wine bar where “our motto is, you can’t drink all day unless you start in the morning.” Nearly everything carries a story with it, including the wine bar itself, a memorial to a friend who barely survived the Holocaust, and then lived to the age of 90 years, dying in 2010. Zax told me that his intent in these shots “was to capture the soul of the shop and what Matt has created here, all these sorts of layers underneath that show how shops like The Bookstore are the lifeblood of our community.”
These shots of Tannenbaum, laughing and relaxed, releasing a seemingly unending stream of commentary while handselling to his customers, alternate with much more static and morose scenes wherein the very same man laboriously takes down credit card information through a glass window and directs customers to stand back as he ceremoniously places their purchase on a stool just outside the front door. “When Covid hit,” said Zax, “at first there was a sadness about not being able to show the bookstore as I knew it. Not being able to continue showing it in its glory. And then it was an acknowledgment that I have the privilege to be filming in an unprecedented time. This was what I was given, to show this transition from the old world into this new world. Once I started accepting that, it became clear that everything I was exploring in the subtext, like the age of Amazon, what’s a bookstore to a community, it all came forward through this process with Covid.”
About one-third of the way through Hello, Bookstore, apparently during the early days of the pandemic, Tannenbaum sits at his computer behind looming bottles of Clorox bleach and hand sanitizer, reading aloud from Willa Cather’s My Ántonia with a sense of wonder: “That is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great.” The scene is just an isolated moment, but one senses that here Tannenbaum is nourishing himself with literature to sustain his hope when so much has been taken away from him. Cather’s sentiment echoes how Zax’s camera elegantly captures Tannenbaum seeping into the community at large through language and storytelling, finding his happiness through these interactions.
“I’m very centered on the needs and desires of my customers,” Tannenbaum told me, “and I’ll take my lead from them and what they want. It’s like being a therapist, and I get to visit them every day. I try to be there for each customer.”
Toward the end of Hello, Bookstore, after the miraculous GofundMe campaign that saves his business, Tannenbaum is musing with a reporter from The Boston Globe on what would have happened if he had needed to sell out and move on. “Who would spend all the hours that I spend for the little pay that I get?” he asks. Clearly, the answer is “no one,” because Tannenbaum has created a space that is his and his alone. Hello, Bookstore succeeds because Zax has managed to occupy this space alongside him and observe this symbiotic relationship between man and bookstore, bookstore and community. The movie is an earnest and urgent homage to a community space that many are now looking for as the pandemic subsides and we make our way back out into the world.
Hello, Bookstore opens at New York’s Film Forum on 29 April and in further cities on 6 May with a UK date to be announced
