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.
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