Bibliophiles' heaven

Bangalore has some treasure troves for the serious book-lover

You haven't been to Forum, asked my incredulous interlocutor, feeling a little sorry for folks who live in the happening city but do not care to look up its grand new shopping mall, set up to beat all existing and new shopping malls in the city for some time. I had, of course, heard of Forum, positioned with calculated precision to make traffic jams five times worse on Bangalore's already-crowded Hosur Road, down which the IT crowd has to fight its way to get to Electronics City.

Try it once, persuaded a more understanding friend. It's got this amazing parking facility to take in close to 1,000 cars. The PVR multiplexes have not yet got going, so the crowd's not so bad; and if you are too broke to shop seriously, which I know you are, then at least visit Landmark. It's got more books than all Kolkata's bookshops put together.

I could have shot back and asked if she knew how many books got sold, not to speak of stocked, at the Kolkata Boi Mela (the city's legendary book fair), but thought it better to go and check out Landmark. I couldn't help being curious. In this day and age when people mostly flip through newspapers to find out which happening parties they had not been invited to, it was indeed odd to have a business invest a fortune to take up huge and costly prime shopping space to stock books!

On a Sunday evening you have to climb a hill, if not a mountain, to get to Forum or Landmark. The parking attendants with walkie-talkies at every parking level tell you it is full and signal you to go up to the next level. Eventually, you reach the roof and park under the night sky, counting yourself lucky you didn't come 15 minutes later, to be told, sorry, parking lot full.

Forum is still being readied, with many shops no more than sawdust, plywood and new paint waiting to come together, and workmen banging away. But Landmark is ready, calculated to bemuse the most hard-boiled bookshop-goer disdainful of glitzy glass.

Landmark stretches over 45,000 sq ft, on two floors. The first floor is given over to music, video games, classy leather accessories and the like. In the milling weekend crowd, in which you can barely move but nobody steps on your toes, you have to ask and find the books on the level below.

When you get there, you first see only rows and rows of shelves. It can take hours to go around the browsers to get an overall glimpse of what is on offer. But the greatest treat is the "out of print" corner where I am able to find authors whom I have not encountered in decades.

There sits, next to G K Chesterton, one of the favourite storytellers of my high school days: Nevil Shute, about whose gentle wartime stories I had until now only talked about to my children.

If Landmark is too big and you want something more manageable then you can opt for Sankars. I have approached Sankars with circumspection, the way our dog approaches his food. He never rushes, but edges up quietly, circumnavigates the food dish with his nose, approves, then very slowly starts to nibble. You soon realise that he is not a reluctant eater but his primeval instincts tell him that he does not know when he will eat again. So he must not rush and gobble up the food, but relish it little by little.

The main Sankars bookshop is right next to our office, just off St Mark's Road. Its reputation travels not just by word of mouth but, should you be a scribe, through the periodic invitations to a reading or a launch. You realise that it is the same Sankars that runs the airport bookshop and the tasteful little collection at Le Meridien. So you approach the mother shop with circumspection, select the day and time so that there aren't too many people and you can relish the fare.

Once you are in, you know why the reputation has travelled. Elegant shelves, spacious walkways between them and not a speck of dust anywhere are fine. But the hallmark of a good bookshop is the way it knows what its readers want, and so has those books upfront. Then you are not searching for you don't know what, but discovering layers upon layers of just what you were looking for. And if the shop itself covers a tidy area then there are that many more subject areas to be delved into.

Big and not-so-big bookshops can be great. But if you have a fetish about smallness and think bookshop browsing is not half fun if you haven't imbibed a bit of dust, then you can just walk around the corner to Museum Road where you will find the museum piece, Premier bookshop.

The shop has the stamp of its legendary owner who knows what his readers want, and these offerings are usually at the top of the piles near the entrance. And for those who want to discover for themselves, there are overloaded shelves upon overloaded shelves, where every little slice tells you not to judge a book by its spine.

Premier bookshop is, of course, a palace compared to Foreign Publishers' Agency, on Kolkata's Grand Hotel arcade which has little more space than a traditional paan shop. It is no bigger than a biggish alcove but, like the quintessential great bookshop, has just the titles you are looking for "" that is, if you have a taste for radical politics, film and literary criticism and the good old classics, in that order.

The proprietor would have been worth a fortune if you were to add up all the outstanding credit that he had freely given to generations of the city's intellectually-aspiring youngsters. I remember raising a toast to him during my first exposure to BBC TV in the mid-1970s when I was freely able to relate to the historian being interviewed, E J Hobsbaum, whose The Age of Revolution I had picked up from Foreign Publishers'. That little hole-in-the-wall bookshop had put me right within the mainstream of the happening world of international scholarship.

Landmark finds a place for books in the happening life of Bangalore. When it comes to bookshops, size really doesn't matter.