Pavement booksellers are on their way to become an extinct species. More’s the pity because those vendors, who would chat animatedly about a rare first edition of an European classic, have been supplanted by inscrutable faces who will point out listlessly at the bestsellers spread out on mats. Can’t blame them actually since top on the demand roster are the pulp paperback thrillers.
And according to my bankable bibliophile, Rafique Baghdadi, a man of a hundred interests, including arthouse movies and the quaint back lanes of the city, the best amidst the surviving pavement bookshops flanks a bank diagonally opposite Flora Fountain. “You can never return empty-handed from that spot,” he affirms, adding that rare book hunters should also check out the heaps of books scattered on the roads at King’s Circle.
As for the second-hand hardcovers and paperbacks, which were a delight for browsers at Smoker’s Corner, on Pherozeshah Mehta Road, Baghdadi sighs, “It’s not what it used to be, but it can’t be written off either. You could still maybe come across the out-of-print works of quite a few British authors.”
Like most book lovers, though, he chronically misses the closure of the New and Second-Hand Bookshop at Kalbadevi, where book hunting was once an adventure, and anyone with time on hand, could while away time there, lost amidst the stacks of books that have probably been shredded by now. Shortage of storage space in the city, with prohibitive real-estate prices, was inevitable perhaps.
On chatting with a diverse salespersons at the bookstore franchises in town, a heartening trend emerged. It seems despite the demand for low-brow thrillers, predictable romances, sex-laced stuff and chick-lit, the all-time bestsellers happen to be literary works: Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Any Rand’s Fountainhead and the classics of John Steinbeck, Fydor Dostoevsky, Anton Chekhov, Herman Hesse and Albert Camus.
These authors remain the perennials. And of course school and college regimens ensure that Shakespeare is never off the shelf. Ditto Jane Austen, George Orwell and Thomas Hardy. And of late, accor-ding to one salesperson, the stores are regularly packed with close-by campus students poring over collections of essays and “heavy-duty” academic journals.
“Of course, we do get strange requests,” one bookstore attendant pointed out. Like a student came in last week and asked for a DVD of Shakespeare’s As You Like It. She hadn’t had the time to read the play and thought a quick look at the film would do the trick at the exams the next day.” Oh well, it takes all types I guess.