The Sunday Haul (on 4-10-2015)

Last Sunday I was at Abids to search for titles worth picking up from the thousands of books laid out on the pavements which is like heaven for book lovers like me. Maybe because I was alone I managed to find five good titles. Of these five titles three were copies of books I already have. Somehow I find it very difficult to avoid buying more copies of books that I have in my collection. One reason is that they are hard to find and hence whenever I come across extra copies I buy them up. About one tenth of my book collection is made of multiple copies of the same titles.

Of late I am finding collections of short stores and also verse especially of our (Indian) writers of an earlier generation. I had found an anthology of verse sometime back and this Sunday again I found another anthology edited by Vilas Sarang. It has poems by some familiar names like Nissim Ezekiel, Jayanta Mahapatra, A.K. Ramanujam, Arun Kolatkar, Keki N. Daruwalla, Dom Moraes, Dilip Chitre, Eunice de Souza, Adil Jussawala, Gieve Patel, etc. I am absolutely delighted that I found this little gem.

About two or three Sundays back I had seen a copy of ‘All is Burning’ by Sri Lankan writer Jean Arasanayagam on a shelf with a seller on the pavement. It was a bound copy but it was not in a good condition so I did not feel like buying it though I was aware I may not be able to find it again. I saw it again the next Sunday at the same place but I did not buy it. Last Sunday however I gave in and bought it for just fifty rupees. It has nineteen stories: The Journey, I am an Innocent Man, Elysium, Time the Destroyer, The Mutants, Man Without a Mask, From Distant Ophir, The Golden Apples of the Hesperides, All is Burning, The Sand Serpents, The Innocents of the World, Prayers to Kali, Fragments from a Journey, A Fistful of Wind, Bali, A Husband Like Shiva, ‘I Will Life Up Mine Eyes,’ Two Women and an Apple, Fear: Meditation in a Camp.

I’ve managed to pick up all the copies of ‘Mandingo’ by Kyle Onstott that I’ve come across after reading it somewhere. So far I have found two copies, both with the same cover and when I saw a different edition with a different cover last Sunday at Abids I bought it. It was in a heap of books being sold for twenty rupees and I was glad I got my third copy of ‘Mandingo’ that cheap.

Another find was a second copy of Martin Amis’ ‘The Rachel Papers’ that I once again got for cheap at just twenty rupees. It was in a good condition and I was quite glad I found it. I had bought my first copy of this title quite a long time back, maybe five or six years ago. I must have written about finding it on this blog.

Another title I got at the same price of twenty rupees was ‘Without Feathers’ by Woody Allen. This was a good copy and my third or fourth copy. I wouldn’t leave behind anything by Woody Allen that I find anywhere.