The Sunday Haul (on 20-06-2021)

When the lockdown was imposed sometime last year I was distraught for a few weeks as it meant I couldn’t go to Abids to buy books. But luckily I discovered a couple of sellers of second hand books on WhatsApp who held regular sales and I ended up buying a lot of books from those sellers. Last Saturday a large consignment of books were delivered about which I will write in the next post. On Sunday I went to Abids because the weather was perfect and the lockdown was totally lifted which meant I could browse all day if I wanted. But I usually browse for only a couple of hours and return before lunch. I found three nice titles last Sunday at Abids.

One of the first travel writers I read was Bill Aitken and ‘Seven Sacred Rivers’ was the first of his several books I read over the years. Still there were a couple of titles by Bill Aitken that I hadn’t found was ‘Footloose in the Himalaya.’ It was my first find at Abids last Sunday, and turned out to be an almost new copy that I got for just fifty rupees. The seller was someone who knew me well and always gave books to me far cheaper than to others.

There are a few classic books that I haven’t yet got around to reading and ‘Tales from the Arabian Nights’ is one of them. Though I have come across several editions of this book I haven’t found one that I really liked and wanted to read until last Sunday when I came across a beautiful copy of ‘Tales from the Arabian Nights’ edited by Andrew Lang. This book too I got very cheap. I paid only fifty rupees for it without bargaining.

Not many know it but NBT or National Book Trust is a fantastic treasure house of some really wonderful titles. I think they must have published all the famous Indian classics by Indian authors. I have bought several such NBT titles but none of them were poetry collections. Last Sunday I found a copy of ‘Both Sides of the Sky’ edited by Eunice de Souza. Published in 2008-9 it is a collection of poems by fifty eight poets starting with Nissim Ezekiel and including all the famous names of Indian poetry such as Kamala Das, A.K. Ramanujan, Adil Jussawala, Keki N.Daruwalla, Arun Kolatkar, Gieve Patel, Dom Moraes, Agha Shahid Ali, Dilip Chitre, Jayanta Mahapatra, Imtiaz Dharker, CP Surendran, Jeet Thayil, Vijay Nambisan, Menka Shivdasani, and also younger poets like Meena Kandasamy, Tishani Doshi, Anjum Hasan and many others. I was quite thrilled to find it because it was a treasure that I got for just twenty rupees!