How It All Began

In the early years I wasn’t such a regular visitor to the Abids Sunday second hand book market. I went occasionally when I was in town because I was posted in a place quite far away from Hyderabad. In those days I used to come home only during the weekends. With just one day- Sunday- of holiday I just couldn’t find the time to go to Abids as I had to catch up with friends, get the laundry done, run other errands and not to mention, get some rest after a week’s hectic work.

Also, I did not buy books at Abids with the intention of starting a collection. I bought the books only to read them. So I bought only those books I thought might be an interesting read. I do not remember many of the titles I bought in those early years. Later I came to know about le Carre, Len Deighton, Bill Bryson, Dave Barry and began to look for their titles. I would come across many books by Indian writers but at that time I foolishly believed that their books were no good so I did not buy many books by Indian writers. Much, much later after it dawned on me that Indian authors writing in English were good, and after I began to read the reviews in LR I began to buy such titles like ‘The God of Small Things’ by Arundhati Roy, ‘Midnight’s Children’ by Salman Rushdie and so on.

Pradeep Sebastian, the bibliomane as he would like to refer to himself, columnist and author of ‘The Groaning Shelf,’ and one of my favourite books is my chief inspiration. It is through reading his column in The Hindu’s ‘Literary Review’ that I came to know about several wonderful writers and books that I would otherwise have not known. I used to cut out his columns and preserve them and in fact I still have a few cuttings including the one where he wrote about Bill Bryson. It was in his columns also that I first read about Anne Fadiman’s ‘Ex-libris’ that I was lucky enough to find almost a decade after first reading about it. ‘The Groaning Shelf’ by Pradeep Sebastian is perhaps the first book on books in India. It is a collection of his various columns where he talks about books, printing, type and so on. I love TGS so much that I have snapped almost every copy of TGS that I have come across. I have two brand new copies and also three second hand copies that I have found at various times.

So far I must have bought a few thousand books in the almost three decades that I've been collecting books. I am 57 now and I have no idea how many more books I will buy.

Summer of '42 by Herman Raucher

Decades ago when I was in my early twenties and in a Harold Robbins-Sidney Sheldon-Robert Ludlum-Alistair Maclean phase a friend gave me a copy of ‘Summer of '42’ by Herman Raucher. It remained unread for nearly a decade and half because I thought it wouldn’t be so interesting whatever my friend might have told me. When I finally read it, (why, I don’t know) I realized how incredibly stupid I had been to have not read that gem of a book for so long. But having read it I experienced a strange tender feeling that overcomes me whenever I happen to see the cover of the book. It takes its place in a separate shelf I have filled with my favorite titles that I treasure and never let go out of my sight.

For several years it was the only copy I had. My friend did not ask for it, and I did not want to return it to her. I found a second copy at Abids that had the same cover. I do not remember now when I found this second copy. But sometime in July of 2010 I found my third copy of this classic. This too had the same cover and I got it for just twenty rupees.

Over the years I reread ‘Summer of '42’ several times, and I reread it only recently a couple of months back and experienced the same feelings I had when I read it the first time decades back.