The Sunday Haul (on 28-10-2018)

With the festival of Diwali not too far away the shopkeepers at Abids had kept their shops open on Sunday which meant that some of the booksellers who sell their books on the pavements before these shops had to move away to other spots. Apart from these few booksellers who moved the other booksellers were at their usual places. It was a bit warm last Sunday as I and Uma browsed for books and I ended up finding four good titles.

I have to think of a drastic way to prevent myself from buying books on writing because I have about two hundred such books at home and despite reading all of them I do not seem to have improved on my writing skills. Last Sunday the first title I found was a copy of ‘The Creative Writing Course book’ edited by Julia Bell and Paul Magrs. It was quite bulky and looked like it would be of some use to me so I bought it.

The second and third finds were crime fiction titles by authors I had never heard about. The second title I found was a book that looked like it had changed a lot of hands and that had an attractive cover. It was a copy of ‘The Quiller Memorandum’ by Adam Hall, and I was surprised to find on the cover that it had been made into a movie starring Alec Guinness, Max Von Sydow, and the screenplay is by none other than Harold Pinter! I got this title pretty cheap, at just ten rupees only.

The other crime fiction title I picked up was a hardcover copy with jacket, of ‘Mandrake’ by Paul Eddy who was another writer I hadn’t read about anywhere till then. Paul Eddy, I read inside, was the creator of ‘Flint’ who also I have never read about. Anyway, I was glad I found this title that had a lot of praise on the blurbs at the back. This too I got pretty cheap, twenty rupees only.

The last find was a cookbook that I would have bought anyway but something on the cover caught my attention. On the cover of ‘Traditional Indian Cooking’ by Amiya Chaudhuri it was mentioned that inside was an essay on ‘Gastronomy in India’ by Nirad C. Chaudhuri. Inside I found the original bill of ‘Book World Enterprises’ Kalbadevi Road, Bombay dated 4/12/1993. For twenty five years the receipt was inside the book and no one had taken it out. It gives an impression that whoever bought it may not have used the book.