The first book I bought from my first salary was the Penguin paperback Carry on, Jeeves, by P G Wodehouse. It was from the Higginbotham’s in Chennai’s Mount road. In those days, their sales assistants wore white shirt, white pants and tie, looking more like railway station masters.
While commuting for work from Guindy to Egmore by a suburban electric train that sped almost jerk-free, unlike a bus, I read, one by one, the masterpieces of ‘Plum’, the comedic guru. The regulars, mostly railway officials, looked at me apprehensively as I burst into laughter now and then, tickled in the ribs by the feather of a Wodehousian gem. A prim old Anglo-Indian lady, a regular commuter, who looked like the alter ego of Aunt Agatha, sat as far away from me as possible and armed herself with a neatly rolled parasol.
The James Hadley Chase’s ‘unputdownable’ thrillers that I had as a side-order, were to be finished in one gulp like a post-dinner port. Bookworms borrowed them from lending libraries and passed them on to fellow bookworms. Some of them scribbled their bizarre comments on the title page. One riposte under a risqué comment was “Which birdbrain had written this?” I could not resist from writing: “You find him. I will fix him!”, a title of a Chase thriller.
Many Wodehouse fans got their paperbacks bound, as they enjoyed a long shelf life, unlike Chase’s pacy thrillers, with more verbs than adjectives. The worst treatment a book received was from a traveller in Frankfurt airport. He fished out a paperback from his rucksack and started reading, but when he finished reading a page, he tore it and dropped it in the nearby bin. Finally when he came to the last page, he threw the wrapper, with nothing in between, into the bin having had transient gratification.
One thing that book lovers face is the non-availability of bookmarks when they want to stop reading and pick up the thread later. Some rely on their memory. Some use bus tickets, laundry bills, toothpicks—anything they find nearby. One obnoxious way is to fold down the top corner giving the page a dog ear. Some of them prop the book down, its spine facing the roof. Perhaps to help readers not good at even simple arithmetic, who wish to know the number of pages left, one inventive publisher had numbered the pages in the descending order. The result? The page where one is, is the number of pages left! Bravo! A book lover can gratefully count on them for more novel innovations!
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