Though I had another interesting five-book haul last Sunday at Abids I wasn’t happy. The reason is that since the past few months I have been bringing in hauls of five-six books on an average and now there are far too many books at home. I don’t think I will be getting enough time to read all the books I’ve bought till now and that is making me a bit depressed because there is nothing I like more than to read. The problem is that when I see books I want to buy those I like and at Abids I find many books I like and end up buying them. Last Sunday again I found five interesting titles.
A long time ago it was quite by chance that I had picked up a Jerzy Kosinski title at Abids unaware of his books. I just picked up ‘Passing By’ on a hunch and later after reading that collection of amazing and bold essays I wanted to read more books by Jerzy Kosinski. Sometime later I found a copy of another title of his- ‘Pinball.’ Last Sunday ‘Passion Play’ by Jerzy Kosinski was the first title I found at Abids. The seller was a greedy fellow who usually asks for outrageous prices but last Sunday I managed to get the book for just thirty rupees.
The second find was an interesting one. I spotted a copy of ‘Let Them Call It Jazz’ by Jean Rhys. It wasn’t even a regular book but something half the size of a book. It turned out to be a collection of three short stories of Jean Rhys: Let Them Call It Jazz; Outside the Machine; and The Insect World. I got this cute book for thirty rupees.
After a long time I came across an Ernest Hemingway title that I don’t have. I saw a copy of ‘Islands in the Stream’ by Ernest Hemingway. It was a fat, thick hardcover copy with a jacket that was torn in places and stuck together with tape. It had the appearance of an old, original copy and that excited me. I looked inside and saw that the publisher was Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York. I had no idea if it was a first edition but it was published in 1970. Whatever, I bought it and since the seller was someone who was one of my favourite sellers at Abids I got this 466-page book for fifty rupees only.
A couple of minutes later with another seller I saw another book that looked really old looking at the cover. It was a copy of ‘The Sword and the Sickle’ by Mulk Raj Anand. I was excited about this copy. There was ‘KUTUB’ on the cover and when I looked inside I read that it was published by Kutub Publishers Limited, Bombay in 1955. It was the Indian edition and the original edition was published in 1942 elsewhere. By its appearance I think it is an old copy worth retaining so I bought it for forty rupees.
A long time ago I managed to get hold of a new copy of ‘Travel Writing’ by Don George when I still could not stop dreaming about travelling and writing about it. In it I had come across a list of ‘Travel Literature Classics’ made of twenty titles. Of those twenty titles I managed to find six: ‘Arabia Through the Looking Glass’ by Jonathan Raban; ‘Arabian Sands’ by Wilfred Thesiger; ‘In Patagonia’ by Bruce Chatwin; ‘A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush’ by Eric Newby, ‘Venice’ by Jan Morris, and ‘Southern Gates of Arabia’ by Freya Stark. I am constantly on the lookout for the remaining titles though it seems highly unlikely that I would find any title by Patrick Leigh-Fermor whose ‘A Time of Gifts’ is No. 17 on this list. At the bottom of this list, No. 20, is ‘The Worst Journey in the World’ by Apsley Cherry-Garrard. This is the same title I picked up last Sunday at Abids.
Though I had spotted it a few months ago I did not buy it. At that time I wasn’t aware it was in that list of Travel Literature Classics. However, something about that title was nagging me and I looked in my copy of TLC and realized I had made a horrible mistake not buying it. When I began to look for it frantically next Sunday I couldn’t find it and the seller also had no idea about it. I couldn’t see it for the next few Sundays until it turned up again last Sunday. It did not take me more than half a minute to buy it. The icing on the cake is that I got the book for half the price the seller quoted once he realized I was eager to buy it. When I told him I wouldn’t pay more than seventy rupees and began to walk away he accepted my offer. I got the book just like that. But reading this massive tome is going to take longer than it took to buy it. It is nearly six hundred pages of dense print.
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