Yesterday morning while on the bus to my college, I saw this banner at YMCA Secunderabad advertising a used books sale…I sat up… but, there was no name of the seller on the banner…is it a books sale by Best Books, I wondered? Because it is they who regularly have their books sale at YMCA and I had found some good wish-listed books at their sales on earlier occasions…I made up my mind to get down near YMCA on my way back from college in the evening and see what I can get this time…
As expected, there were stacks and stacks of books on the tables on shelves on boxes waiting to be unpacked…books books books everywhere…and it turned out that it was the first day of the sale…so I was in with a fine chance of landing a good catch…I checked my wallet and gave myself a tolerably good budget with which I could comfortably buy 3-4 books…
So, armed thus, I set out on my book seeking odyssey inside the sale hall…I was surprised to George Lamming’s In the Castle of My Skin right away…this book has been in my wishlist since 1993(?!)…yeah, that long…I never thought that I’d encounter this book in a used books sale…I read this novel as part of the Commonwealth Literature syllabus at Pune University, and the unique narrative structure of this novel stayed with me and two years later I decided to work on this novel for my MPhil…I wanted to own a copy of the novel, but it was not available anywhere in India and I remember I had to make do with a photocopy. Much to my regret, I completed my MPhil thesis without owning a copy of the novel that I worked on. This regret remained and I ventured many times to buy a copy, but getting one from abroad would be an expensive proposition, and so, this wish remained just that…a wish…until yesterday when out of the blue I find a copy and that too for maybe 10% of the price of a new copy…cool…I clutched it tightly…
I saw a lot of interesting books... I picked up a couple of them tentatively and continued to walk around…I then came upon a stack of books on humour and located some Dave Barry books…wow…wonderful time pass books…Dave Barry became one of my favourites ever since Vinod gifted one of his books to me when he first visited us…I picked up three Dave Barry books…Dave Barry Does Japan, Dave Barry Turns 50, and Dave Barry-Greatest Hits…I had reached my budget limit and decided to jettison one of the two books that I’d picked up earlier after I found In the Castle of My Skin…I retained Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha by Roddy Doyle…enough…I was moving towards the cash counter and I turned and saw a book by Italo Calvino…can’t leave a Calvino behind, can you, even if you have to breach your budget? I hadn’t heard about this book earlier – Hermit in Paris-Autobiographical Writings and as the title says, it contains autobiographical essays…good one…and good that I found it, but I am certain it was not there when I passed by that stack before…I hungrily added the book to my growing stack, not without a fleeting thought at my breached budget limit…this book was more expensive than the others…because it is a Calvino? I gave myself a budget raise…what to do…
Good, I thought and then I thought I spied a familiar name…one of which I already had in my hands now…another Calvino, a thin one, was hiding between two fat books…Invisible Cities…never thought I’d find this masterpiece in a used books sale…but I know now that nothing is impossible…I found three such books in one evening…needless to say, my budget exploded…couldn’t keep any of these books down now…at least 3 books more than I thought I’d buy…I then carried these small treasures to the cash counter and requested the proprietor to give me a small discount…he graciously did…maybe he saw a pleading book lover’s face or maybe it was a largish enough purchase on the first day of the sale and he didn’t want to say ‘no’…can’t say…
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