Love among the bookshelves

Every book collector moves from one book-filled room to another, inhabiting a private universe strung together by words.

You search for books and sometimes books are in search of you. I look at my sprawling shelves and flatter myself that their inhabitants made their way especially to me, assured of a safe home. 

Growing up in the 1980s, the only new books I remember buying regularly were deliriously beautiful volumes like the Latvian folktale The White Deer and Maxim Gorky’s Danko’s Burning Heart, courtesy of the Soviet Union. Book shopping almost always meant second-hand stores, a reflexive tic that survives today, even in the age of franchise outlets and malls. I make my own circuit of the handful of decent stores in Hyderabad. By visiting them in turn once a month, I allow them enough time to replenish their stocks. I can see the lines of books change like geological strata, as some copies sell while others languish for years. Sometimes I feel sorry for these monadnocks and am compelled to pick them up. Hence the study on the architectural features of Minsk or a report on safety features to be followed when designing stadiums amidst my collection. Sometimes the books take more active measures. Twice, over two separate visits, an anthology of Washington Irving stories fell on my head. Despite no particular interest in Irving’s oeuvre, these repeated impacts made me feel that it would be wise to pay heed to such omens. 

Just as a text read and reread can reward you with new meanings, new insights, so can bookshops. Just last week, M.R. Book Centre in Begumpet, a store I’ve been visiting for ages, suddenly pulled back a shelf to reveal a door leading to an hitherto unsuspected basement. I went down the steps and found a room where books were being sold by the kilo, a transaction that is a fantasy for every collector. I immediately began depredations with an omnibus edition of Vernor Vinge’s galaxy-spanning adventure A Fire Upon The Deep topping the scales. 

As I weighed up my purchases, I thought of other basements, of a vast subterranean world, from Any Amount of Books on Charing Cross Road to Goobe’s on Church Street in Bengaluru. Every collector moves from one book-filled room to another, inhabiting a private universe strung together by words. 

Worlds within pages

I take them home and inscribe the place and date of purchase. Thanks to this habit, my shelves are an invisible map — of memories, feelings and emotions — that I alone can decipher. A reverie in my study is to perambulate the world. A pulp paperback Who? by Algis Budrys takes me to the market under Waterloo Bridge, recalling to me the sights and sounds of that long ago afternoon of boats making their way through the Thames. A slightly foxed copy of The Prestige by Christopher Priest evokes a winter evening in Munich spent in the Readery on Augustenstrasse, the rustle of turning pages counterpointed by the hush of falling snow outside. A brick-like tome on The Occult by Colin Wilson purchased in the “Any Rs 5/-” heap on the pavements of Abids traps the heat of a forgotten Sunday morning. These books have made journeys too. They sometimes contain little slivers of worlds trapped like insects in amber. A 1963 edition of William Does His Bit by Richmal Crompton, which I purchased right here in Hyderabad, was once the possession of the Parsee Youths Assembly High School in Dadar. A card slipped in a Greg Bear novel informs me that its previous owner was a Preferred Guest at the Burbank Airport Hilton in 1987. The sprawling signature of a long-dead British civil servant adorns a treatise on the Flora and Fauna of Persia. 

Books, books everywhere

Ideally, a kind of teleportation should exist between store and home. While Bangaloreans might be disgruntled by the toy train-like reach of their Namma Metro, I found that for a bibliophile visitor it is perfectly purposed. Staying with a friend in Baiyappanahalli, I suggest a trawl through Church Street. Within 15 minutes we are at M.G. Road station and the exit drops you right amidst Blossoms and Bookworm. I first, however, cross the river of traffic on Brigade Road, for my destination is the Select Book Shop run by the legendary K.K.S. Murthy and his son. At first glance the store is just three rooms, with barely enough space for a snail to trim his whiskers. I know enough about relative dimensions that I ask Mr. Murthy’s son to lead me upstairs, which acts as a warehouse. My friends joke that my apartment is a library with an attached bathroom. Here this process has reached its alchemical extreme. 

The door leads to an apartment, with a hall, a bedroom, a kitchen. But there is no bed, no furniture; no milk will ever boil over in this kitchen. There are only books, books, and books everywhere, covering every surface, filling suitcases, inveigling themselves in every cranny — conspiring to bring about an absolute overturning of the domestic order. They are flung together in no discernible format — a 1941 report on the Marketing of Potatoes in India and Burma lies alongside a 1987 Guide for Motorists in Finland — in a terrible profusion that is dreamt of and feared by every bibliophile. Despite being on the first floor, there is a strange cave-like quality. In repose, the books are safe from their ancient enemy, the sun. 

Different versions of me have beheld this same scene. First there was the boarding-schoolboy who visited Bengaluru on the weekends — who still remembers the excitement of stumbling across a collection by T.E.D. Klein, a horror writer as obscure as he was visionary. Then there was the proto-adult who sought out E.R. Eddison and Michael Moorcock. Now, the man who quested after monographs on Yakshas by Ananda Coomaraswamy. These shelves are mirrors, I muse, as I snaffle an introduction to Indian sculpture by Charles Fabri. Mirrors that hide all the selves that we were and will be in their chaotic depths. 

No man reads the same book twice. 

Source | The Hindu | 3 April 2016

Regards

Pralhad Jadhav

Senior Manager @ Library

Khaitan & Co

Upcoming Event | National Conference on Future Librarianship: Innovation for Excellence (NCFL 2016) during April 22-23, 2016.

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