In December it was the Hyderabad Book Fair. Last month it was the World Book Fair at New Delhi, and again now it is the sale by the Best Book Center people that’s lured me. In the Hyderabad book fair I had picked up almost a dozen books, followed by half a dozen books at the World Book Fair, and on my first visit to the Best Books sale I found only two books. I couldn’t go to the Best Books sale that had begun sometime after the Republic Day but went there on the third day. It wasn’t such an impressive collection on sale and I was disappointed because usually they have some extremely good titles in the sale. If last time they sold books by weight then this time they were offering ten titles for two hundred and fifty rupees. If bought individually each copy would be fifty rupees. Unfortunately I couldn’t find anything interesting in this section. But in a different shelf I spotted two good titles that I picked up almost immediately.
I have this habit of buying multiple copies of books I like enormously. One title that I have found to be a moving account was Chinua Achebe’s ‘Things Fall Apart’ that I read a couple of years back. I have two copies of this title with me that I found a long time back. At the sale I saw another good copy of this title. It was in extremely good condition and looked so inviting that I ignored the price which was a hundred and fifty rupees and bought it.
Currently I am in a Graham Greene phase and I am buying anything that I find by him. When I saw a nice copy of ‘The Third Man/ The Fallen Idol’ I couldn’t resist taking a look at it before buying it. This title was priced slightly lesser than ‘Things Fall Apart’ for some reason that I did not understand. However, in the end I bought this book too. This takes the total tally of books I bought in January this year to 21. I think someone should tie me up on Sundays to prevent me from going to Abids and buying more books to add to my already overcrowded shelves.
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