Since the past few weeks I’ve been seeing a nice copy of ‘All the King’s Men’ by Robert Pen Warren at Abids but have been hesitating to buy it. I was in two minds about it. One reason, a strong one, to buy it was that it was a brand new copy, and plus it was with a seller who would give it to me at any price I asked. The reason that put me off buying it was that it was quite a thick tome, somewhere around 660 pages of dense print that would take me weeks to finish if I ever decide to read it. All these days I have been able to resist the impulse to buy it but last Sunday I succumbed. I bought it for only fifty rupees which seemed to me to be peanuts for the beautiful copy I got.
But it did not take me long to decide on the second find. In a heap of books selling for only twenty rupees I saw Anita Desai’s ‘Bye Bye Blackbird.’ It was a nice copy which had all pages intact and unblemished. I did not need any reason not to pick it up.
My last find wasn’t at Abids but at Chikkadpally. I found ‘the Jaguar’s Smile’ by Salman Rushdie. This was a travelogue (about his journey to Nicaragua) something which I cannot resist buying and so I bought it paying only thirty rupees for it. It said ‘First Publication’ on the cover and when I looked inside I saw that it was published in 1987. I wonder if First Publication is the same as First Edition.
Another curious coincidence of the day’s haul was that ‘All the King’s Men’ had won the Pulitzer Prize and ‘Bye Bye Blackbird’ had won the Sahitya Akademi Award.
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