Every Book and its keeper has a story
BENGALURU: At a time when online platforms for books are offering irresistible discounts, Church Street bookstore trail Books and Brew emphasised the need for patronising brick-and-mortar shops.
“Buy books online, but also buy them offline, from non-chain stores like ours,” said Goobe’s Ravi Menzes, on Sunday, as the book-shop crawl took off.
Starting from the iconic Koshy’s, the 40 or so participants of the Humming Tree event made stops at the old Bookworm at Shringar Complex, Higginbothams, now under renovation, and Indian Coffee House.
The longer shopping breaks were reserved for Goobe’s, Blossom and Select. The half-day tour, guided by Vidhi Jain, Cultural and Creative Head, The Humming Tree, culminated with a discussion at the new Bookworm on Church Street.
On the steps of Blossom Book House sat engineer K R Shankar, offering to write stories for whatever one chose to pay him. At Vidhi’s request, he typewrote one on the crawl (read Blossom), which he read out when the group broke for coffee.
During the walk, book-lovers learnt the stories about the bookstores, the bizzarre experiences the shelves have been privy too, the history mingled with the fragrance of old books.
Goobe’s
What started out as a book stand in a bed and breakfast in an eatery eight years ago is now one of Church Street’s quieter bookstores.
“I had told my ex-girlfriend all those years ago of my dreams to start a chain bookstore,” said owner Ravi Menzes. “Now the bed and breakfast is gone.”
He and his staff don’t merely think of themselves as people who run a shop, but as ‘curators of wisdom’. “We are a library too,” he said. “Whether old or new, you can borrow any of these books.”
He has tips on what the best Church Street stop is for which books – Select for collectibles, Goobe’s for literature and Blossom for the rest.
Select
At the quaint two-storey store off Brigade Road, participants huddled around K K S Murthy to hear him unravel mysteries of its seven-decade past.“Not many know that my father, a lawyer with a passion for books, started Select Book Club, as it was called initially, on Museum Road in 1945,” he said.
One Robertson, a retired employee of the Imperial Bank of India, learnt that Krishnamurthy picked up books from auctions and offered him his garage to set up shop in.
“It moved to Church Street and then to MG Road — the erstwhile South Parade — in the 1950s, then to Malleswaram in the 1960s, only to move two decades later to our current location,” he said.
Look out for the next edition of Books and Brew on the Humming Tree Facebook page.
Blossom – short fiction
A motley crew it was. Beards and blonde, hipsters, intellectuals, but all book-lovers. They introduced themselves over coffee, all bright-eyed and eager for an afternoon of a million words and a few thousand dreams.
He saw her shyly sip her coffee, a wallflower hiding herself from the crowd. He smiled at her from across the cafe. She smiled too, polite and reserved.
Their crawl began at a basement bookstore, quaint and smelling like old books, the smell that always brought him pleasant memories of his grandmother.
He saw her peeking into a copy of The Book Thief. He had only read it a few weeks ago, and instantly it was one of his favourites.
He thought he should say something, anything, but nothing in his head sounded charming. He came up with a creative opening, then hesitated. The moment came and the moment went.
He followed her chestnut hair and polka-dotted skirt. She moved to the classics. He imagined their children reading fantasy novels over warm fires. She was there crouched over their youngest, writing her own novel, and every now and then she would give him that same polite, reserved smile she gave him that first time they saw each other.
He snapped back into the bookstore, his thoughts on romantic overdrive.
He scribbled a little poem into his moleskin, putting the love song from his head to paper.
At the counter, he slipped the little poem into the copy of The Book Thief, and walked away.
-K R Shankar