HYDERABAD: ‘Books are a uniquely portable magic’, chanted my ecstatic mind while skimming through the shelves of Luna and seeing the owner of the words, the King of Horror himself humbly looking up at me from one of the racks. This made me feel so little in the world of words as I was presented with portals that hold magic.
An independent bookstore tucked away in the serenity of a calm old little cottage in Jubilee Hills is the divine destination for readers to revamp the experience of a physical bookstore. “I was fortunate enough to grow up around a lot of bookstores, we wanted to bring back that experience, and hence Luna,” said Shilpa Sudhakar, the founder of Hyderabad’s neighbourhood bookstore Luna. “In the process, we also discovered a huge population of readers in the city,” added Shilpa.
The idea of a book and a bookstore have been contaminated over the years. A book has succumbed to the idea of academic texts for many, while a huge majority has forgotten what it was to smell the pages, flip it, choose a bookmark and have a conversation about the book in the advent of online reading. Many bookstores have become cafes and a space to haul stationeries and all we are left with are a few Crosswords and bookstores in malls. “Luna is a space dedicated to books alone, we were experimenting on whether a pure bookstore would work and happily discovered it did!” she shares. Luna is a cozy home with every room stacked with shelves and shelves of books and a plethora of genres within ample space to explore it.
At Luna, one can peacefully browse through the books without being disturbed. The mellow tunes played, encompasses the readers with a peace that will help them to dive into the books and flee reality. Fresh flowers, warm lighting, caricatures and portraits respect the ambiance of a bookstore, it’s beautiful like a frame conceived by Deakins. The bliss of happy discoveries amongst the somewhat arbitrary collection leading to the connections forged out of the conversations of a book is what makes Luna special. “It’s a place you lose yourselves for a while,”said Shilpa.
In the digital era, no online bookstores can compete with the mood and feel of Luna. There is no reading space but a customer can experience one or two hours of comfortable browsing here. There is something for everyone, be it a voracious reader or a nascent one. Starting from the Indian authors in the living room to the collections of Agatha Christie, Lee Child, Horowitz, Archer, King, Sidney Sheldon and the very famous Harry Potter. But not a bookstore that hoards copies of the same book. “We will be a bookstore that will sell one copy of 20 books rather than 20 copies of one book,” concluded Shilpa.