The Sunday Haul (on 30-11-2025)

 

Every time I firmly resolve not to buy more than one title at the Sunday Abids second-hand book market I end up finding more than half a dozen titles that I absolutely cannot resist buying. It happened last Sunday when I found six good titles that I decided to bring home and add to the hundreds of books lying around. Also, among my four friends who are also avid book lovers I was the one who bought the most books last Sunday.

The first title I found was a copy of ‘Literary Taste’ by Arnold Bennett that was a slim, small book that seemed to be all about how to form literary taste. I bought it since I do not seem to have any kind of literary taste as I pick up whatever appears good to me. 

Then I almost hopped around with joy when I spotted a copy of ‘The Friends of Eddie Coyle’ by George V. Higgins. Though I already have two copies of the same title with the same cover I bought this copy, my third since I could not bear to leave it behind. I got it for just fifty rupees. 

Then with the same seller I found a copy of ‘Mad Dogs and Diplomats’ by P.L. Bhandari since it looked interesting. The author is a retired diplomat and the book seemed to be about some interesting experiences of his various diplomatic postings. I have to look for another title of his that I think I had found a long time back but now cannot remember the title. 

Then another stroke of luck when I found a copy of ‘My Son’s Father’ by Dom Moraes, his memoir of his father. It was an older edition by Bell Books and this copy too I couldn’t resist buying though I already have a Penguin edition of the same title. 

On the way back I spotted a beautiful copy of ‘Men in White’ by Mukul Kesavan, one of the writers whose columns I find to be extremely well informed and perceptive. As the title says it is a book of cricket, a game that I am not at all interested in. But I know Mukul Kesavan writes well so I bought it to read his prose. 

The last find was a beautiful hardcover copy of ‘Mantras of Change: Reporting India in a Time of Flux’ by Daniel Lak, the BBC correspondent. It is a book of the events he covered when he was in India. An interesting thing happened when I was contemplating buying it. One of my friends asked me how much I thought I would pay for it. I said a hundred rupees. He took the book from hand and said he would get it for fifty rupees and went to the seller. After a while he returned and said the seller wouldn’t give it for less than hundred rupees and so I was right in my estimate of the book’s price. I modestly claim this correct guess about the price came with experience of more than thirty five years buying books at Abids.