The annual New York International Antiquarian Book Fair is a maze of glass shelves and display case lighting, a bounty of time portals in the arrangement of a sprawling jewelry convention. Two fourth-edition copies of Don Quixote ask for $120k, while another case contains JP Morgan’s copy of Shakespeare’s Third Folio. There’s a Hemingway archive containing a doll figure of Fidel Castro, cherubic face swallowed by a curly black beard, and a stand dedicated to ephemera of the occult. The clock overhead at the Park Armory, in the city’s Upper East Side, points directly to the 4 and 6, a position no working analog clock would assume.

This time warp is the heart of the antiquarian book trade, and the opening scene of The Booksellers, a documentary taking stock of a longstanding, niche trade in flux. The texts are arguably timeless, able to be read and interpreted far outside their original bindings, but collecting focuses on the specific context of materiality; the time, place, and context of books as objects, and thus as wormholes. An antiquarian book “cuts across time”, Rebecca Romney, a bookseller at Type Punch Matrix featured in the film who has taken her rare book expertise to the show Pawn Stars. “It suddenly just feels so immediate, if something is printed in 1700 and you hold it in your hand – you feel there, you feel present.”

The film is, according to director DW Young and producer/book dealer Dan Wechsler, a “celebration of the book” as object, an exploration of the characters populating and transmitting a tradition of appreciation, and an homage to the fundamental, heady curiosity underlying the drive to collect printed texts. It’s also a portrait of an often insular world broken open, and at times apart, by the advent of the internet. The Booksellers traces a business landscape which frequently maps onto New York, such as the rise and decline of Book Row on Fourth Avenue, which had 48 independent bookstores at its height in the 20th century; today, only the Strand remains.

The film wistfully recalls the bookstores of lore, and the caretakers who inherited the trade that remained largely unchanged for a century. In 90 minutes, Young weaves through the specialty books ecosystem – rare book dealers, appraisers and auctioneers; private collectors with vast personal libraries; archivists and institutions showcasing material; personal journeys into the trade from dealers and literary figures such as Fran Lebovitz and Gay Talese. Booksellers are “discoverers of history”, Young told the Guardian, and thus the film makes “an argument for why preserving physical books is important and it’s not just about them having value as just collectible items”.

The camera finds palpable joy in watching sellers and collectors’ tactile, familiar sense of books, the “real connectivity that you see in the way they handle the material – that’s at the heart of it all”, said Young. But the film also delves into the economic difficulties of the passion, particularly in the digital age. The internet created what Wechsler called “a race to the bottom”, in which supply is overwhelming, and constantly updating, driving a race to “have the cheapest, the best, or the only”, he told the Guardian. The sense of rarity for first editions of modern classics, for example, evaporated as many were listed online; numerous booksellers and stores went out of business.

Part of the mission of the film, then, is to generate a digital record of a turbulent moment in the history of the book trade. “There’s an obligation to record the moment,” said Young, “both for this passing generation, and for this crazy upheaval that’s going on, while we’re still in it a little bit”.

The boon of supply, however has an upside for archivists and historical institutions, which can incorporate individual works or collections to reframe or recast history. The film-makers visit Kevin Young, a poet, collector and director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library. Collectors shape collections that end up at archives, containing “the messy bits, the unexpected bits” – Malcom X’s papers, for example, or James Baldwin’s early attempts at plays and ideas scribbled on bar napkins.

Director DW Young. Photograph: Image courtesy of Peter Bolte

And the digital age presents myriad opportunities for welcome new curiosities and voices into collecting and trade that has overwhelmingly catered to the tastes of older white men. “One of things about the internet is that it creates accessibility, it creates more opportunities for diversity, it lessens things like gatekeeping,” said Romney. The internet has “no doubt dramatically changed the trade”, but also opens the possibility for a “golden age of book collecting, because it’s really about your own vision now. It doesn’t have to be the things the dealer specifically offers you or things you could only find if you live in a city that has a rare bookshop.”

Romney and her business partner at Honey & Wax Booksellers in Brooklyn, Heather O’Donnell, have worked to bring more women into the field and established a $1,000 annual prize for female book collectors under the age of 30. Past winners of the prize have specialized in collections ranging from self-published comics known in Japan as dōjinshi to American vegetarian cookbook memorabilia. In the past, said Romney, one’s ability to locate such niche items, especially outside big cities, was extremely limited. “Now, you can decide, ‘I want to create a collection’ about whatever your imagination can come up with.”

Which leads the trade into cultural traditions and directions outside the so-called canon and stereotypical vision of book collecting as, say, having the money to purchase a first edition copy of Moby Dick. Book collecting can also include print material about sexuality, identity, drug culture, the evolution from dada to punk, hip-hop magazines, pamphlets and ads, kitsch and camp. The Booksellers interviews, for instance, Arthur Fournier, a rare book dealer who managed the archives of Michael Holman, the first writer to use the words hip-hop in an East Village Eye article in 1982. Fellow hip-hop enthusiast Syreeta Gates collects ’90s-era copies of publications such as XXL, Vibe Magazine and The Source that were never digitized. The collections offer a crucial, generative window into what Fournier called the “dreaming together on paper that happened prior to the internet”, the early stages of an art form, before hip-hop solidified as the predominant force in popular music.

But while the film highlights new voices, directions for the trade and younger generations, Romney emphasized that that vision is more aspirational than literal. The trade today remains overwhelmingly white and predominantly over 50; there are still few women. “Those of us who are really thinking about what the trade looks like and what the future of book collecting looks like – that is one of the biggest things that we need to work on: diversity in every sense of the word,” said Romney.

So though people might see headlines of Leaves of Grass selling for $150k and think “Oh, well, that’s not for me, that’s only for rich people”, the world of rare books is, said Romney, open and ready. “It’s for anyone who is passionate about something. No matter who you are, no matter where you live, no matter what your education or background is – I want people to watch the film and say: ‘Oh, I could be part of this’.”