Mumbai's booksellers face the
digital age By Raja Murthy
MUMBAI - Sajjan Das stood sweltering
before mounds of paperbacks and plastic-jacketed
bestsellers on a drowsy Wednesday afternoon in
May, a sentinel of vanishing treasures and
survivor of a once flourishing tribe of footpath
booksellers in Mumbai.
A blazing
mid-summer sun rippled through Chrysophyllum trees
near Flora Fountain onto a few thousand
English-language titles heaped on the road, making
small multi-colored canyons of books for human
browsers to walk through.
Das buys and
sells an impressive variety of works, from fiction
to non-fiction, and new books to old editions
printed decades before the word e-mail became part
of our vocabulary, when Amazon
was a great South
American river and not a giant online book
retailer, and Kindle meant only the verb to
arouse.
Das and neighboring book merchants
are struggling remnants of an urban street culture
as old as cities and as old as the printed word,
but now battling an Internet era where digital
options increase for decreasing leisure time.
A long row of booksellers without shops
once thrived by this busy intersection of roads
stretching from Fort leading to the Arabian Sea,
and alongside the famous Oval Maidan, famed among
for cricket and football.
Ten years ago,
this book avenue was a favorite hunting territory
for bargains and out-of-print editions from
authors ranging from Richmal Crompton, Frank
Richards, Enid Blyton and P G Wodehouse to Agatha
Christie and Leslie Charteris. It is Mumbai's
version of the book market in College Street in
Kolkata or the Sunday book bazaar at Daryaganj in
Old Delhi and the Moore Market in Chennai before
it was burnt down three decades ago.
The
once bustling tribe has shrunk to about 10 book
merchants functioning under venerable trees behind
a gray stone statue of Dadabhai Naoroji
(1825-1917), the "Grand Old Man of India" and one
of the pioneers in the fight against colonial
rule.
Das and colleagues are fighting to
make a living under perhaps the same trees that
were saplings when Naoroji was alive. "Business is
down by 50% these days," he says, "but we still
have a faithful clientele for rare and antique
books, out-of-print editions, as well as for
management, technical and other non-fiction
categories."
It's a crossroads in time for
book merchants making a livelihood out of a
tradition born in 1471 AD, when the first book to
be printed in the English language was said to be
The Recuyell of the Histories of Troy,
translated by William Caxton from Jean de Vignay'
s original in French.
Sale of e-books
overtook sales of paper books for the first time
in the United States last year. Major book stores
chain in India such as Oxford, Crosswords and
Landmark are reinventing themselves to survive.
Like others of its kind, the Oxford book
shop near KC College in Mumbai includes a small
tea lounge with nearly a hundred choices of tea,
including Chinese "gun powder"; and patrons could
read books for free lolling on cushioned stools,
in air-conditioned comfort and with soft music as
backdrop. Alongside book shelves were glass
counters selling DVDs, music CDs,coffee mugs,
Parker and Sheaffer pens, t-shirts and even
18th-century clocks.
No such options exist
for roadside book merchants like Sajjan Das. They
can only continue to also serve as valuable
conduits, preservers or givers of new life to
forgotten old books from households and dusty
trunks. "Sometimes, after a book collector dies,
his son or family sells his books, and we get the
stock that interests other book collectors," says
Das.
A decade into the future, in 2022,
it's likely be a moot thought that paper books,
leave alone roadside booksellers, will have become
as uncommon a daily sighting as ink bottles for
fountain pens. Will a parent in 2072 have to
explain to a child that people once read books
made out of paper?
For now, folk continue
browsing through books spread out like a roadside
feast, and never quite know what can be found in
this paper banquet. One of Das' customers
unearthed a book with a hand-written note from
Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), who won the Nobel
laureate for literature in 1913 and was one of
India's more revered names in poetry and arts.
A few customers, including two teenagers,
ask Das for specific titles. But there is not
quite a rush be-fitting one of the most
tourist-frequented regions of Mumbai. Located just
a few minutes walking distance from Das' book
collection are the Marine Drive promenande, the
Gateway of India, the Mumbai museum, the Jehangir
Art Gallery and the Colaba shopping district.
Das, in his mid-thirties, says he dropped
out of school. However, he can pick out a title
from fiction, management, computers, history and
other categories - all from a collection
representing days when a notebook wasn't a type of
laptop.
"In earlier years, students used
to come here often to get material for their
school projects," says Das. "They used to buy old
National Geographic magazines and so on. Now they
get all their information from the Internet." In
fact, stacks of National Geographic past issues,
once a standard sight in these street side
bookshops, were not to be seen this May day.
Likewise, familiar piles of popular comics
seem to have lessened or disappeared from these
roadside book havens. Barely four Asterix and
Tintin comic volumes were visible, while dozens
were easily found in stacks 10 years ago.
This old Mumbai avenue of comics and
paperbacks was also a thriving lair of book
pirates, as Asia Times Online reported eight years
ago (see India's
bootlegging book bandits April 23, 2004). But
Das claims piracy has been abolished in this day
and age. "We don't keep pirated books anymore," he
insists. "There's not much of a difference in
margin of profit, and these pirated books have
many misprints."
A dubious looking Harry
Potter paperback stared up from near him, whose
sale proceeds will not look likely be adding to J
K Rowling's billions. But then Das and co looked
relaxed sipping their 4 pm tea, not quite keeping
a weather eye open for the swooping municipal van
confiscating unlawful merchandise. Either Das was
truthful about book piracy having disappeared or
diminished, or the municipality was busy with
other more pressing engagements.
"Children
nowadays also buy comic books here, but times are
changing," says Lalith, a neighboring vendor.
"Non-fiction books sell more, and old favorites
like William are hard to come by, as are
hard-bound editions or those with gold-engraved
titles."
Lalith, like many others of this
street side book keeper tribe, has a strong
memory. He says he remembered me enquiring years
ago for out-of-print Billy Bunter books by
Frank Richards. I had given him a contact number,
as is procedure, for an alert if any wanted book
arrived. "I have not received a Bunter book for
quite some time," he said, and listened quietly as
I told him that the original Richards books,
appearing in the weekly Magnet magazine
(1908-1940), are now freely available from a
website uploaded by fans.
But these
street-side book merchants, can sometimes offer
what the Internet and eBay may not always provide.
That afternoon, I saw a 1956 paperback of Lord
Charnwood's critically acclaimed biography of
Abraham Lincoln, from New York's Pocket Books
publishers, marked for 55 rupees (about US$1).
Amazon was offering a 1998 edition for $14.73. The
original price rubber-stamped on the inside page
of the old paperback was 0.80 paise in 1956, a sum
not nearly sufficient to buy a small glass of
roadside tea in 2012.
Archival
black-and-white photographs of Mumbai circa 1956
shows the car park around the Flora Fountain
opposite a tram station. Where are they now, those
people of over 50 summers ago who traveled those
trams and trekked along the same road on which I
stood talking to the book merchants? Are they
living happily in a ripened old age, or have they
been reborn in a happy plane of existence, with or
without books?
Did they remotely imagine
the incredible modern day marvel called the
Internet offering instant access to millions of
books, words, images, sounds and live pictures
across continents and oceans?
Evolving
technology can enable carrying dozens of books in
a small hand-held gadget, or even change fonts to
eye-friendly sizes. But technology as yet lacks
the little sensory touch that makes memories, like
that unmistakable fragrance of browning paper of a
vintage book - a signature of nature as timeless
and unforgettable like the first rain drops in
summer.
Das instantly responds when asked
if he thinks his roadside book business will be
around after 10 years, and if he will need to look
for another job. "Whether there is the Internet or
not, books will always be there," he says, but a
question is whether they will be made of paper, or
be 3D hologram projections of words in space.
(Copyright 2012 Asia Times Online
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