NEW YORK, NY.- Robert Gottlieb didn’t just edit books. He voraciously read and collected them.

On Saturday, a portion of his personal library — his books on show business — were sold at a fair in the lobby of the Metrograph theater on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.

When Gottlieb, who died in June 2023 at 92, wasn’t heartlessly lancing thousands of words out of Robert Caro’s biographical volumes or marking up the manuscripts of Toni Morrison and Salman Rushdie, he loved watching movies. Along the course of his career, he built a vast collection of books on Hollywood’s golden age.

His family was unsure what to do with the collection until earlier this year, when they started talking with Metrograph, a two-screen cinema that is a pillar of the downtown art house scene.

Visitors lined up to buy “My Life with Chaplin,” “Fasten Your Seat Belts: The Passionate Life of Bette Davis,” “Little Girl Lost: The Life & Hard Times of Judy Garland” and hundreds of other books. When they opened them, they found a stamped seal reading “From the Library of Robert Gottlieb.” The books were priced around $15 to $40.

Reinaldo Buitron, 28, a documentary filmmaker, flipped through a book about Italian director Roberto Rossellini.

“Being able to touch the same books Gottlieb had in his own home is surreal,” he said. “I see we admired the same films, and that makes me think we might have gotten along. That we could have sat for dinner and talked cinema and about his opinions on semicolons.”

“People don’t think like Gottlieb did anymore,” he added. “Whether film or publishing, it’s all about the algorithm now, and not taking risks. The world needs more Gottliebs.”

Many of the people at the book fair weren’t old enough to have followed Gottlieb’s rise in publishing, during which he led Simon & Schuster, Alfred A. Knopf and The New Yorker. They had become smitten with him after seeing the 2022 documentary “Turn Every Page,” which focused on his intense working relationship with Caro.

The documentary, which was directed by his daughter, Lizzie Gottlieb, depicted how the two men had collaborated, often combatively, since the 1970s, and it portrayed the race against mortality they faced as Caro labored to complete the fifth volume of “The Years of Lyndon Johnson.”

“It’s different from writer to writer,” Gottlieb says in the film, speaking of his life’s work. “Sometimes it’s a highly emotional relationship, because a transference gets made, as in psychoanalysis, and the writer needs to use the editor for emotional or psychic reasons, and that becomes part of the relationship. It’s not deliberate. It happens.”

Some who bought the books owned by Gottlieb said that possessing them let them feel closer to a bygone world of literary and intellectual life in New York.

Katherine Sedlock-Reiner, 17, who recently graduated from Saint Ann’s School in Brooklyn, scored a copy of “Conversations with Greta Garbo.”

“All those passionate arguments he got into with Robert Caro, and all his opinions about the comma, I just admire that so much,” she said. “To be a writer now and have someone like a Robert Gottlieb seems rare. To work with an editor who has the willingness to want to get to know your mind.”

Will Regalado Succop, 21, a budding writer from Brooklyn, said he was working on his first short stories but had yet to publish anything. “It’s romantic to me that Gottlieb and his writers bickered over semicolons,” he said.

As the day waned, the inventory depleted. Choice offerings like biographies of Joan Crawford and anthologies of Pauline Kael’s reviews for The New Yorker grew scarce.

John Gillen, 32, an aspiring filmmaker who secured a copy of “Hollywood Be Thy Name: The Warner Brothers Story,” offered a less misty-eyed view of things.

“If a writer needs to work on a sentence for three weeks, then they need to work on a sentence for three weeks, and I respect that,” he said. “But people also have to eat. You can’t just say you always want to be making Michelangelo’s David.”

David Fear, 53, an editor and film critic for Rolling Stone, snagged a copy of Dwight Macdonald’s “On Movies.”

“If you believe that a comma put in the right place is the work of the divine, then what Gottlieb represented isn’t antiquated,” he said. “But I also think everyone mourns the era they missed. The idea of writing off an entire generation of young writers just because they can’t have editors like Gottlieb is foolish.”

“The online beast needs to be fed now,” he added. “The idea of wrestling tooth and nail over paragraphs just isn’t practical anymore.”

Reached by phone that evening, Gottlieb’s daughter, Lizzie, reminisced about her father’s habit for collecting things, including 1950s Lucite handbags and Scottie dog art, alongside his film books.

“We had to let the books go,” she said. “There were just too many. But it’s gratifying to know they will now have another life. My father wanted books to have a life.”

She was touched to hear that the young writers and cinephiles knew about her father’s legacy.

“I made the documentary for that exact reason, because it’s a vanishing world I felt needed to be documented,” she said. “But I hope the takeaway isn’t that it was just about fighting over semicolons. I hope what these young people can take away from my father is that it is joyful to care deeply about your craft and to want to devote yourself to it. It’s not about being precious.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.