Karnataka - Bangalore   

Hunting ground for bibliophiles

— Photo: V. Sreenivasa Murthy

Old is gold: Second-hand books on sale at Avenue Road in Bangalore.

BANGALORE: It is said that a city’s character is determined by the number of bookstores it has. A visitor to Bangalore in search of books in the late 1990s had many places to go to — M.G. Road, the narrow lanes off Brigade Road, Majestic, Balepet, Subedar Chatram Road and Avenue Road — where he could buy books for a song.

But many of these areas have now gone upmarket, all except Avenue Road, where a book lover can still get a bargain or two.

Walking through this busy street one can find books stacked up to a height of 9 feet and as far as the eye can see. There are books on every possible subject.

It is a common sight to see bibliophiles leafing through the books, with the sellers adroitly finding them the one they want. The majestic trees after which the road was named are no longer there. Now it appears to be books that this road is known for.

Bibliophiles insist that this is the place where old Bangalore lives on. Govinda Rao of Vijayanagar, who works in an aluminium company on Tumkur Road, spends his Saturday afternoons looking for books here. He was in search of Chasing the Monsoon by Alexander Frater. “This road has never disappointed me. I have found In Search of Secret India by Paul Brunton, Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and George Orwell’s 1984, all right here,” he says.But the influx of academic books has outnumbered the collection of general books, says Velu Murugan, one of the booksellers, handing out a book of Unix version 4 to a youth clad in jeans.

“We get all sorts of books. After the exams, students return books. If they are in good condition we cut anywhere from 25 to 30 per cent of the cost and resell them. In the case of rare books, we try to restore them.”

There are also unusual requests from youngsters. Mr. Murugan remembers one such request for the lyrics of songs by George Baker Selection. Ganesh, another vendor on the same road, says rare books fetch more than the cover price. C. Rajagopalachari’s Mahabharata fetched him the cover price of a new copy even though the book was over six years old.

Old-timers remember when a similar book bazaar used to thrive in Balepet till a year back. But after the BBMP’s clean-up operations there, the second-hand book market is now restricted to Avenue Road.

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