While
that serendipitous Sunday ended with ‘absolute clarity,’ I was also aware that
with absolute clarity comes absolute responsibility … yeah … and so, feeling
all responsible, I went to my shopping cart … I had the three Hari Majestic novels, I had The
Book Hunters of Katpadi … I also had Umberto Eco’s Chronicles of a Liquid Society
… it was simple actually … I would go for all these books as these were the ones
that grabbed my attention through those reviews and articles …
But
as it turned out finally, things changed mid-way and I ended up not buying the Hari Majestic novels this time … though
expensive, I felt strongly about Umberto Eco’s Chronicles of a Liquid Society
… this being his last book and so I decided to buy it … and I realized I was on
an Eco trip when I started browsing other essay collections by Eco … I was interested
in Faith
in Fakes: Travels in Hyper-reality and Inventing the Enemy: Essays on
Everything, but settled for Faith
in Fakes … this was an unanticipated buy and out went responsible
buying …
While
browsing books by Eco, for no reason at all, amazon kept ‘recommending’ other sort
of ‘similar’ books … Patrick Suskind’s The Pigeon kept flying across my
face much too often … his earlier novel Perfume was intriguing and outstanding
… I had read the novel, and was fascinated … and also saw the movie based on it
… so, the author was ‘tried and tested’ … I said yes to The Pigeon … feeling less
and less responsible now …
The Book Hunters of Katpadi? This book I wanted to buy and read …
desperately, actually … as I wrote in my previous post, “… somewhere I knew that if at all anybody wrote a bibliomystery in
India in English, it would be Pradeep Sebastian” … it was as if I was
waiting for this book even before it was written …
After
the books arrived, I read a couple of essays in Chronicles of a Liquid Society
and before long I was away for five days … visited Mangalore and Shimoga last
week, actually … after I returned I picked up The Book Hunters of Katpadi
… I am reading it very very slowly … mystery apart, it is a treat for those who
are passionate about collecting books and making books (book making?) … all
about antiquarian books, sellers, rivalries between collectors, papers, letter
press, founts, binding … I have crossed a hundred pages and I can say that
beneath the mystery flows a narrative of book collecting and books making in
India …
But
what warmed my heart was this passage right at the beginning … this is narrated
by Kayal, the young associate of Neela, the owner of Biblio in Chennai, India’s
first full-fledged antiquarian bookshop … Kayal is putting together a catalogue
of modern Indian first editions and working out the tricky business of
identifying them and then this comes as an example …
As
I came to the bottom of the page, I rushed to my bookshelf and pulled out …
very very gently … my Rupa paperback copy of English, August … I had read this novel many many times, lent it to
friends and now I was wondering if the copy I had was the 1988 edition … I opened
the copyrights page and saw the year … and it is …. yesss …. it is 1988!!!
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