Ohio native Jason Rosette was a film student at New York University when he was first exposed to the city's curbside-bookselling scene. Every day he would pass the tables lining the streets near Washington Square Park, tables laden with used books of every sort, and he eventually got to know the booksellers themselves. Some were homeless, some not, some were as nice as can be, some not, but nearly each one had an interesting story to tell. Many seemed to be operating under aliases: Slick Rick, Pornography John, Polish Joe and Al Mappo (who sold maps), to name a few. Poor and curious, Rosette was sucked into that little world; he got his own table, he got his own books (mostly from estate sales and kindhearted librarians), and he joined them. That was about eight years ago.

In 1995, Rosette picked up a video camera and started filming his daily routine. What resulted is a feature-length documentary called BookWars. BookWars is an introduction to Rosette's comrades and a street-level view of life in Greenwich Village, that once-gritty, now-touristy swath of Manhattan that is one of America's most literary neighborhoods. (It has housed the likes of Edgar Allan Poe, Edna St. Vincent Millay, O. Henry and Dylan Thomas, not to mention a whole slew of Beat writers.)

"I wanted some kind of record," Rosette says. "Not necessarily a journalistic document, maybe more portraiture than anything else, to look back on and share with whoever was interested."

But as BookWars' title suggests, there was a battle going on--a battle waged between Rosette's bookselling comrades and City Hall. Mayor Rudolph Giuliani had just been elected to office, and he was beginning to implement his "Quality of Life" program, which entailed the removal of the city's street vendors.

"It became clear that the story had to be told before it was too late," Rosette says. "I thought it was an interesting scene which had become threatened with extinction by the powers that be in the new New York."

The police pressure became pretty intense, and Rosette finally called it quits and headed to Los Angeles, where he set up his book shop on Venice Beach. But he eventually returned to New York, where he got a job teaching video production at Manhattan's Parsons School of Design--not far, in fact, from his old hangout on West 4th.

BookWars' New York premiere is in early June, and Rosette says it will then make its way to art-house movie theaters around the country before hitting video stores.