The Sunday Haul (on 12-08-2018)

The haul of books I make every Sunday at Abids is usually an interesting lot with titles I cannot find anywhere and also, sometimes, includes a surprise find. Last Sunday however I was in for a double surprise. It had rained quite heavily the previous day and the forecast was that it would continue to rain on Sunday too. Luckily it did not rain on Sunday though the sky was overcast. I came home with six books but five titles.

The first book I found at Abids was a really old one, the type face on the cover giving the impression that the book was printed sometime around the fifties. On the cover was this title-‘The Street of Ink’ by K. Iswara Dutt. I was intrigued by the title and when I looked inside it turned out to be some sort of memoir by a journalist. I flipped through a few pages and saw that there was something about the time spent by the author in Hyderabad as PRO of Hyderabad and was also a journalist who rubbed shoulders with the high and mighty of the time. I became excited when I saw that it was published in Masulipatnam in 1956 by Triveni Publishers and printed at Huxley Press in Madras. I got this interesting title for fifty rupees.
Next to -‘The Street of Ink’ by K. Iswara Dutt was a nice copy of ‘Grifter’s Game’ by Lawrence Block that I picked up for thirty rupees. After finding these two books I sat in the Irani café chatting with my friend over a cup of chai.

Since a couple of weeks I’ve been seeing dozens of books from ‘Books n More’ library of Marredpally in Hyderabad that seems to have folded up. When I spotted a copy of the 1972 edition of ‘The Foreigner’ by Arun Joshi I was thrilled that I had found a second copy of the same edition. Sometime back I had found the same edition but it wasn’t in a good condition with the cover coming apart. But this copy was in a plastic jacket and seemed to be from the library. I got it for fifty rupees. Even before I could come out of the excitement of finding this lovely copy I spotted another copy of the same title but it was a later edition 1993 that I see often. But I cannot resist anything by Arun Joshi so I picked up this copy too making it the tenth or twelfth copy that I possess.

In another heap of the same library’s books that were with another seller who was selling them for twenty rupees each I saw a copy of ‘Some Inner Fury’ by Kamala Markandaya. This too seemed an original edition published in 1956 in the United States of America. It was in a fair condition encased in a plastic jacket. I bought it along with a copy of ‘The Happy Highwayman’ by Leslie Charteris from the same heap of books from ‘Books n More’ library. It was published by Hodder and Stoughton in 1963. I had heard about ‘The Saint’ but I don’t know much about it so this title gives me the opportunity to know more.