The Sunday Haul (on 09.12.2018)

With the 32nd Hyderabad National Book Fair just a week away, on Sunday I was wondering whether to go to Abids and saddle myself with some more books. But I went more out of habit than a real need to buy more books. It was the second Sunday of the month and so The Hindu had the Literary Review supplement in which Uma Mahadevan Dasgupta had written about her visit to Sri Lanka in an article where she had also mentioned some lines from Sri Lankan author Ashok Ferrey’s ‘Serendipity.’ Quite coincidentally ‘Serendipity’ by Ashok Ferrey was the first title I spotted at Abids. I did not need much persuasion and so I picked it up for just thirty rupees.

Another good title I found was a nice copy of ‘One Thousand Nights on a Bed of Stones and Other Stories’ by K.A. Abbas which was published by Jaico in 1957. The book has ten stories: Wheat and Roses; Maharaja’s Elephant; Cartoon; Evening in Paris; Dead Letter; Sparrows; The Mark of an Indian; Ajanta; and Five Faces of Mother India. I got this book for only twenty rupees from a pile.

I usually check out old copies of hardcover titles in the hope of finding something rare and interesting especially if they have no covers and one cannot tell the book unless it is opened. I spotted one such hardcover bound in brown with a seller who sensed I was interested in it. On the inside page was the title- ‘Of the Raj, Maharajas and Me’ by M.A. Sreenivasan, another memoir by a civil servant. I try to avoid such books because they are usually dry accounts of their service in some posting they think is interesting and write every minute detail of each and every incident as if they were earth-shaking events. But this title appeared different because the publisher was Ravi Dayal there were beautiful old black and white photographs inside and the language too was very different. M.A. Sreenivasan was an ICS officer and from what I read while randomly turning over the pages he seems to have had some interesting experiences that I wanted to read more about. So I bought it and added it to the growing pile in the Sunday haul.

The find of the day was a beautiful copy of ‘The Big Sleep and Other Novels’ by Raymond Chandler. I already have a copy of ‘The Big Sleep’, a copy of ‘Farewell, My Lovely’ and also a copy of ‘The Big Sleep’ but ‘The Big Sleep and Other Novels’ had all these three Chandler classics in one place so that was enough reason for me to pick this up. However it did not come cheap and I had to pay more than two hundred rupees for this lovely title.