Walk-through of Bangalore booksellers – past to present

Veena G | NT

Bengaluru: Ravi Sondhi Spirit of Bangalore Lectures is an annual event hosted by Sondhi’s children.

This year, Indian historian Padma Bhushan and Sahitya Akademi awardee Ramchandra Guha gave a lecture on the occasion of the second Ravi Sondhi Spirit of Bangalore Lecture. He spoke on ‘The Booksellers of Bangalore’. He recalled the dream he used to have, of going to a gorgeous second-hand bookshop with hardcover books, where the top shelf would have a Cardus’s biography.

He would ask the bookseller casually how much it cost… about “Rs 10” and then he would wake up from the dream. Speaking fondly of experiences from his student life in bookstores in Delhi, Mumbai and Bengaluru, Guha took everyone through the many shops in his lecture. Some of the finest books in his collection were “brought from second-hand bookstores”.

The first English biography of Gandhi written by priest Joseph Doke, and signed by Gopalkrishna Gandhi was bought from Delhi's Daryaganj Sunday Book Market. His relationship with bookstores is woven with personal anecdotes.

In the “Bangalore” scene – he prefers Bangalore as opposed to Bengaluru, calling them both culturally distinct – Guha spoke about the legendary Select and Premier bookstores. He took the listeners to the Select Bookstore, which he first visited in the summer of ‘76 or ‘77, of which he had been a patron of when it was owned by KBK Rao. He highly valued Select Bookstore for all it had to offer for his research. He found a small book at the store, which was in Tamil, a language he could not understand.

But the last few lines were in English and read: ‘This is the horoscope of my granddaughter Janaki cast on her birth on March 22, 1910’. It was his grandmother’s horoscope. When his grandfather died, some books were sold, and this one was one of those. Another “beloved” bookstore that he mentioned was the Premier Bookstore.

"Select gave me stuff for my research; Premier gave me stuff for my heart and my soul,” he said. One of the first books he bought from Premier was Isaiah Berlin’s biography of Karl Marx in 1980. He narrated the map of the eccentric bookstore and where the shelves were located. He fondly recalled his interactions with late “Mr” Shanbhag. From Blossom Bookstore on Church Street, Mayee Gowda called up Guha to sell the first edition signed copy of DG Tendulkar’s eight volumes of Gandhi.

Bookworm Bookstore’s Krishna Gowda called up Guha who connected him with Ashoka University to sell archival copies of ‘Marg’ magazine from 1946-2010. He spoke about the irony that is Bangalore, which in spite of being the knowledge capital of the city, does not have even a single decent library. He noted that this lack of libraries is compensated for with bookstores like Blossom and Bookworm.

“Though Premier and Select have gone, happily, Goobe, Champaca, Bookworm and Blossom are still here,” he said, going on to add, “Bangalore probably has the most intelligent English book buying culture in the country