DAC Nights: The Booksellers and Book Swap!
An in-person event
Wednesday, December 20, 2023
7-9:30pm
Come to the Dougherty Arts Center on Wednesday, December 20, 2023, and take in a screening of the 2020 documentary The Booksellers. Explore the world of rare books collectors and dealers in New York, celebrating book culture and book lovers alike!
While you’re at the DAC, why not also prepare for the holidays with an early celebration of Jolabokaflod, the Icelandic tradition of giving and receiving new books. DAC will have a collection of books ready for the swap, so bring your own to spread the love of reading and holidays!
This event is free! Registration is required for the film screening, as space is limited.
If you just want to swap books, the lobby will be open to anyone with a new or gently used book and a dream! Please bring books in new or gently used condition. Any books with significant tearing or marking will not be accepted for swap. Books will be available to swap starting at 7:00pm through 9:30pm. Don’t have a book to swap? Some starter books will be available for the bookless.
The film will begin promptly at 7:15pm, with a runtime of 100 minutes.
For more information about this event, email DACTheater@austintexas.gov
About The Booksellers:
Antiquarian booksellers are part scholar, part detective and part businessperson, and their personalities and knowledge are as broad as the material they handle. They also play an underappreciated yet essential role in preserving history. THE BOOKSELLERS takes viewers inside their small but fascinating world, populated by an assortment of obsessives, intellects, eccentrics and dreamers.
Executive produced by Parker Posey, the film features interviews with some of the most important dealers in the business, as well as prominent collectors, auctioneers, and writers such as Fran Lebowitz, Susan Orlean, Kevin Young and Gay Talese. Both a loving celebration of book culture and a serious exploration of the future of the book, the film also examines technology’s impact on the trade, the importance of books as physical objects, the decline of used and rare bookstores, collecting obsessions, and the relentless hunt for the next great find.
And perhaps best of all, THE BOOKSELLERS offers a rare glimpse of many unique and remarkable objects, including the most expensive book ever sold, Da Vinci’s The Codex Leicester; handwritten Borges manuscripts; jeweled bindings; books bound in human flesh; essential early hip-hop documents; accounts of polar expeditions published with samples of real wooly mammoth fur; and many more.