HYDERABAD: It may be disappointing to see book store giants like Crossword or Landmark to reduce the number of their bookshelves, good news is at hand. A few bookstores in the city other than Sunday Book Market offer to sell their stocks by kilos. The best part is that you discover not your usual prints of
Dickens and Joyce, you discover much more that also weighed like your regular food staple. Food for thought did someone say?
Walk into MR Book Center, Begumpet and the sections greet you with Doris Lessing, Joseph Conrad, Guy De Maupassant and other classics not for `100 each, but several other books just at `100 a kilo. Says Mohammed one of the partners in the shop, “We clear our stock that way which includes a lot of books that see many seasons inside the book shop and get yellowed and old. But most of them are in good condition and taken by several book lovers and students alike.”
And it’s not just novels and non-fiction that you can grab, there are dictionaries in Urdu, Arabic, French, Hindi and other languages. Other than that you get several books for children especially for drawing with small stories written on the facing page.At Sri Vasu Book Centre, Sultan Bazaar, King Koti you find books printed in in USSR before it fell some 30 years ago by Raduga publishers that are no longer available in print. The wonder that the book store offers is: it has the old editions by Leo Tolstoy, Pushkin, Gorky, and Chekov, Olga Perovskaya and several other Russian writers.
The owner Balakrishna tells us as to how he got hold of these books, “These books are from my previous customers who sold off their collections.” That’s how you find beautiful hardbound books like: Anatoly Markusha’s ‘Miracle on Wheels’, Yuri Dimitriv’s ‘Animals on a Pedestal’, Oleg Tikhomirov’s ‘Grasshopper and the Little Soldier’. The best part is that these books come with exquisite illustrations and the stories that they tell are often set in realistic modes. But how often do they come up with this books by kilos offer? Sadly the same is not available all the time. You have to keep an eye or get in touch with the shops for enquiry.
saima@newindianexpress @Sfreen