K S Mukundan has a house full of books – literally. Law books stacked from floor to ceiling, five rooms full. But unlike the Baa Baa Black Sheep rhyme, Mukundan doesn’t give away his books – he sells them as and when someone asks for them. But even with the periodic selling, his collection is so big that he had to hire an entire house to keep them in.
Sounds familiar? Well, you’re not the only one in this predicament. Book collectors all over the city face the same problem of space. To manage with the little space they have, some build bookshelves while some others box up their collection and let it sit in their lofts.
Others like S A Govindaraju hire garages to house their collection. “I started collecting when I was very young. The Penguin Paperbacks were my addiction,” says the septunagerian. The owner of Rare Books in R A Puram, Govindaraju’s collection had become so big that he couldn’t keep it at home anymore. “It became simply impossible to live with it. So I had to shift to my garage in 1998,” says the collector who has more than 5000 books and precious old editions of newspapers.
People say that you’re not a bookworm if you don’t have little piles of books lying around your house. A small pile on your dressing table, a couple of books on the coffee table out in the living room – and maybe even one or two wedged somewhere inside your sofa. And all this in addition to the huge bookcase (which is stuffed to the maximum by the way), in your house. As if this is not enough, you get an earful from the parents for spending all your paycheck on books or the maid who spends half her lifetime cleaning those stacks.
Take S Bhagirathy, for example, whose whose mother threatened to burn the books that were eating up space, at one point. Spanning three generations, her book collection is boxed and parcelled off to different locations to manage them all. “I move around a lot. So everytime I do move, I send out a batch of books to my parents’ place. When they run out of space, they send some of my books to our native in Tirunelveli. It’s all quite unmanageable,” she says.
Even though most of these collectors unfortunately resemble pack-rats, their love for books supercedes any other concern. “These books are treasures. In one day I can take what I want and give away or throw away the rest of the books but I can’t,” says Mukundan, whose collection has given birth to Old Law Books on Arundale Road, Mylapore. “I’ll definitely buy more books if I have more space, but what do I do? I have no space,” laments Mukundan, who is now contemplating shifting the collection back to his own house.
Govindaraju, perhaps, sums up the feeling of every collector unanimously. “Whenever I don’t feel well, I come sit here in the middle of my books and I immediately feel better. I don’t think anything else can do that for me,” he fondly says.
