The Sunday and Other Haul (22/4/2018)

NTR Stadium in Hyderabad is the venue for many events such as exhibitions, fairs etc that take place there regularly. Since the past couple of years it is also been the venue for the Hyderabad Book Fair. It also happens to be quite close to where I live and also on the route to my office. Whenever there is an event there I get to know it beforehand somehow. A seller at the Abids book bazar told me about the Hyderabad Fest that was to be held from April 13-22 and he added that there would be many stalls selling books. Sometime last week I found the time to drop in at the Hyderabad Fest twice. There were around 30-40 stalls selling second hand books mostly. However despite so many stalls I ended up finding only two good books and while buying one of them got to experience first-hand a common phenomenon in the book trade.

It was on Thursday I went to the Hyd Fest for the first time. I picked up a nice and old copy of ‘A Farewell to Arms’ by Ernest Hemingway that had an attractive cover. I found it at one of the stalls put up by an Abids second hand bookseller. I got the book for fifty rupees. At another stall, it was one by a Bombay based second hand book-seller; I saw a beautiful copy of ‘The Sheltering Sky’ by Paul Bowles. The seller wanted a hundred and fifty rupees for it which I thought was too much. I tried to bargain but he did not budge so I left without buying it and regretted it all of Thursday night and until Friday evening when I decided to drop in at NTR stadium and pick it up.

When I looked around for the book I was not able to locate it for some time but ultimately found it in a corner. I looked around for the seller but instead another Abids seller who had the adjacent stall came over. I was a bit shocked when he told me he had bought the entire stock in the Bombay based seller’s stall and asked for two hundred rupees for the same book that I could have bought for a hundred and fifty rupees the previous day if I had any sense. I tried to bargain but the new seller told me he couldn’t afford to sell it at the price I could have bought it the previous day. It was too good a book to miss so I paid the two hundred rupees and walked out with the book wiser with the experience.

On Sunday at Abids I found a nice copy of Vimla Patil’s ‘Entertaining Indian Style’ that had a very beautiful cover. I got this recipe book for forty rupees and this was the only book I found at Abids.

The Sunday Haul (on 15-4-2018)

Sometime last month I had finished reading ‘The Book Hunters of Katpadi’ by Pradeep Sebastian that was in the library at the Institute where I am currently posted. One of the main characters in it mentions a list of Indian titles published by Jaico, Hind Pocket books in the forties- sixties that she is searching for relentlessly. I did not recollect the titles when I stumbled across a handful of Indian titles by Hind Pocket books at Chikkadpally last Sunday on the way back from Abids. I had never before seen the titles in such good condition. I had come across umpteen copies of ‘The Coffer Dams’ by Kamala Markandaya, and also ‘The Lalru Murders’ by Mangat Rai but hadn’t thought of buying them because of their condition. But last Sunday I found very good copies of ‘The Coffer Dams’ by Kamala Markandaya, ‘The Lalru Murders’ by EN Mangat Rai, and also a beautiful copy of ‘The Spy in Amber’ by Manohar Malgonkar that were published in the sixties. They were almost like new and I was surprised they were still in such a good condition even after nearly sixty years. I got these three titles for thirty each and a copy of ‘The Serpent and the Rope’ by Raja Rao, another old edition but not in such a good condition, for forty rupees.

Yesterday I looked up ‘The Book Hunters of Katpadi’ by Pradeep Sebastian but was disappointed that not one title I had found at Abids was mentioned. However, I was terribly pleased that I had the sense to pick up these beautiful copies. I am not really interested them in selling them but I want to retain them with myself and show them off. Quite surprisingly, while ‘The Serpent and the Rope’ by Raja Rao is a 1968 edition, ‘The Lalru Murders’ by E.N. Mangat Rai is a 1973 edition while the copies of ‘Spy in Amber’ by Manohar Malgonkar and ‘The Coffer Dams’ by Kamala Markandaya do not carry any year of publication. I was surprised to read that ‘Spy in Amber’ by Manohar Malgonkar was rendered into a novel by Sunita Malgonkar, his daughter, from the screenplay written by Manohar Malgonkar.

I had read about ‘Flow’ by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and also remember jotting the title down in a notebook long back. Last Sunday I found a copy of this title at Chikkadpally that I bought for hundred rupees. Before that, at Abids, I had found a copy of ‘Cooking the Punjabi Way’ by Aroona Reejhsinghani that I got for twenty rupees.

The Sunday Haul (on 8-4-2018)

It is hailstorm season now in these parts. There had been more than a couple of days when it had rained in the evening bringing down the temperatures leaving the city cool. Last Sunday was the most unusual Sunday morning in summertime, weather wise. It actually rained in the morning when the normal trend was the rain doing its job in the evenings. However last Sunday morning it started to rain around half past eight and for some time it looked like it would go on raining for a couple of hours. It meant I wouldn’t be able to make it to Abids for browsing on the pavements for books. But fortunately it stopped raining after an hour and all was well with the rest of the day.

I’ve been picking up books on writing since a long time and over the years I have come to own quite a large and also impressive collection of such titles. While reading one of these books I came across a recommendation of ‘Writing Fiction’ by Janet Burroway that I noted down in one of my note books. I haven’t been able to trace that notebook now‘ after finding ‘Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Fiction’ by Janet Burroway at Abids. It is a bulky volume and in the examples were excerpts from novels by known and unknown writers and also some short stories by greats such as Grace Paley (A Man told Me the Story of His Life) and also Lydia Davis (Story) whose titles I am dying to find. I haven’t found a complete book by Lydia Davis so far but have managed to find story collections that had a couple of stories by her. I have no idea how long I have to search before I find something by Lydia Davis. I got this copy for eighty rupees together with another book.

Long after I began collecting cookbooks of all kinds I found, at last, a copy of ‘A Taste of India’ at Abids. It was only a couple of years ago and that was my first copy. Last Sunday I found another copy of ‘A Taste of India: The Definite Guide to Regional Cooking’ by Madhur Jaffrey. This copy had a different cover on which it said ‘Pavilion Great Cooks.’ The print on glossy paper was different and there were dozens of beautiful colour photographs filling up the pages. The copy itself, though looking ancient, was something to behold. I got this book for eighty rupees.

The rest of the haul was made up of three more recipe books. There is nothing much to write about them. See them below here.

The Sunday Haul (on 01-04-2018)

It was a bountiful harvest of five wonderful titles at Abids last Sunday. Though there was a forecast of a cloudy sky in Hyderabad it wasn’t so when I landed up at Abids in the morning. It was too warm for comfort and it looked like it would get hotter later in the day. I am used to coming in the morning though it would have been sensible to come in the evening. Coming in the evening would mean missing out on good titles that would have been picked up by others.

The first find was a beautiful copy of ‘Gangs of Wasseypur- The Making of a Modern Classic’ by Jigna Kothari and Supriya Madamgarli. I had watched ‘Gangs of Wasseypur-II’ and had regretted not watching ‘Gangs of Wasseypur-I.’ I don’t think I will ever get to watch it in the future but I was glad I found this title.

The next find was in a heap of books selling for only ten rupees. My eyes skimmed through the titles of the books and fell on a tattered book. It was an old copy of ‘The Cat and Shakespeare’ by Raja Rao. It was a 1971 Orient Paperback edition and though the spine was exposed the pages were all inside and held together somehow.

‘After I had read ‘The Outsider’ by Albert Camus I was drawn to his writing and wanted to read more of him. I couldn’t find many titles by Camus and was on the lookout. Last Sunday on the pavement at Abids I spotted a copy of ‘Albert Camus: Selected Essays and Notebooks’ Edited and Translated by Philip Thody. The Introduction says ‘that the essays and others texts published in this volume are not primarily concerned with Camus’s philosophical or political ideas. They are intended to give a portrait of Camus the writer and literarcy critic, as well as Camus the individual.’ The book is divided into four Parts containing 18essays in Part I called ‘Lyrical Essays’ and seven essays in Part Two called ‘Critical Essays’ and the remaining two parts (Part Three and Four) are about how he wrote his books and extracts from his notebooks. This was exactly the kind of book I wanted to read so picked it up for just fifty rupees.

Near the Head Post Office from among the hundreds of books spread out on the road I managed to spot the copy of ‘Granta- Issue No 129-Fate’ that looked almost new. I picked it up mainly for Kent Haruf’s essay titled ‘The Making of a Writer’ and ‘Key Stroke’ by Will Self that was about JG Ballard’s typewriter.

Earlier while Uma was picking up books for his niece I spotted a copy of ‘Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs’ Judi Barett, illustrated by Ron Barett that looked interesting and bought it. It was in a heap of children’s books selling for twenty rupees. I had come across the name often and had wondered what it could be. I was not aware that it was the title of a children’s books.