The Sunday Haul

After missing my usual visit to Abids the Sunday before last I could make it this Sunday. Though I was not entirely successful in my resolve not to buy any more books I could limit my picks to just one book. Sometime back I had read ‘A Stone for Danny Fisher’ by Harold Robbins that I had somehow not read back in the eighties when I first started reading such books. There are a couple more HR titles I have yet to read. So when I came across a title that I had not been aware of I took it. It was ‘The Fence.’ The cover made it appear like it must be one of the original editions published sometime in the seventies. I was right and it turned out to be a first printing published in 1975. The artwork on the cover gave that look of the seventies. I got it for just thirty rupees. This was the only book I bought on Sunday.

But strangely enough, I am not able to find any mention of this book- The Fence- on the net. I keep coming across ‘Hopping the Fence’ but not ‘The Fence’ which is quite intriguing. I have a copy of the actual book but there’s no mention of it anywhere which is making me wonder if this title is some kind of a rare title or unknown title. There has to be more to this story and I promise I will keep looking for more about this title until I know the truth.

Monday too was a holiday so I felt like going to a bookstore. On my last visit to MR Books somewhere in Begumpet I had noticed that they had a new collection. In fact all the books I had bought recently were from this store. On Moday I saw ‘Best American Essays, 2005’ and felt like buying it. It had twenty five essays by writers like Edward Hoagland, David Sedaris, Jonathan Franzen, David Foster Wallace, Ian Frazier, Oliver Sacks, names I have come across earlier, and also by some writers I am not familiar with. It was at an unbelievable price of Rs 50 only which is something pretty unusual in a second hand bookstore.