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These books are second to none
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Yearning for the Edgar Wallaces, Gore Vidals, Nick Carters, and Du Mauriers you once read and threw away? A new secondhand bookshop has all these and more.
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Leisurely browsing at Blossom.
IT MAY not be the next best thing to Select Book Shop but Blossom: House of Used Books, tucked away inside Brigade Garden on Church Street, is a lively, decent alternative to all those mostly hole-in-wall affairs that we in Bangalore like to call secondhand bookshops.
With a total of more than 20,000 books, it houses mostly pulp but has two tiny sections devoted to literature - classical and contemporary - that are worth browsing. Perhaps the best thing about Blossom, now a little over four months old, is that it has, in most cases, several titles by the same author.
In most other used bookstores you'll find, say, one stray copy of a P.D. James or James Michener or Graham Greene. I spotted at least six P.D. James mysteries here. Mayi Gowda, Blossom's youngish owner and the even younger Mahesh, who runs it, have somehow managed to zero in on books from the '60s, '70s and '80s that are not easy to come by. Not rare in the antiquarian sense but titles that are out of print.
Hard to come by pulp like Edgar Wallace, Robert Bloch, Colin Wilson, Georges Simenon, the Ellery Queen and Alfred Hitchcock anthologies, William Goldman, Cornell Woolrich, Lobsang Rampa, Ted Mark, Nick Carter and about 50 Chase titles. Not to forget a pile of Westerns.
And middlebrow stuff like James Hilton (a paperback copy of Lost Horizon and what is rarer still - an omnibus volume containing Horizon plus Goodbye Mr. Chips and Random Harvest),
Alberto Moravia, Paul Gallico, A.J. Cronin, Georgette Heyer, both the Irvings - Stone and Wallace - (early, unavailable titles like Passions of the Mind and The Sunday Gentleman), Daphne Du Maurier, Earl Thompson, Nevil Shute, a Mary Westmacott (Agatha Christie's pseudonym) omnibus and, of course, Reader's Digest Condensed.
The classics literature shelf has the usual line-up of Signet and Bantam consisting of Austen, Dickens (here too you can spot a rare Dickens, The Mystery of Edwin Drood), Henry James et al.
The contemporary lit section is on the same classics shelf and takes up three-and-a-half rows displaying the sought after writers: Heller, Shaw, Roth, Bellow, Mailer, Greene and the ubiquitous Wodehouse.
If you look carefully you can spot a Nelson Algren, a Thomas Wolfe, three John O'Haras, one Bret Harte collection, three James Jones, one Yasunari Kawabata and two Gore Vidals. I even spotted a Wilfrid Sheed! Tipped my Sheed-loving friend who descended on the bookshop anon and grabbed it.
But the one true find here is the now out-of-print play by Joseph Heller, We Bombed In New Haven. And probably even as I write this, somebody must be walking away with the book.So what inspired Mr. Mayi Gowda to start this delightful store? Rather unusually, after getting his engineering degree, he began modestly with hawking books on pavements. When this turned lucrative, he got the idea to begin an actual second hand bookshop. His source? "I roam all the corners of Bangalore looking for these books," he says, "particularly Majestic. Also, old circulating libraries that are closing and want to sell their books."
But how did he know what books were valuable? " I used to read a lot and watched what others were reading. And I just thought anything that is literature has to be valuable." Mahesh, his B.E. classmate, confesses with a laugh: "I didn't know anything about books till I joined the shop. But I have some idea now from seeing what customers buy or want; also now I know that whatever Mr. Murthy (of Select) occasionally buys from here or asks us to look out for are the sought-after titles."
Blossom has a small collection of hardcovers that presently don't amount to much and the non-fiction shelves are mostly self-help and business books.
Apart from the usual children's fiction, it has arts and crafts books, Illustrated Classic comics, and Calvin and Hobbes. It had a hard-to-find Peanuts collection that Anju, a habitual browser, beat me to. "I come here," she said, "for its range. I was looking for the Richard Gordon series and found three here!"
Whether Blossom will fold up (like most secondhand bookstores eventually do) or run successfully depends on how often and how well it can get hold of new stock. Unlike firsthand bookshops with a constant supply from distributors, used bookstores in India are faced with the problem of sourcing. Where and how can they source them? A service they undertake is to scout for books on request. They also buy used books. At the moment, most books are slightly over-priced (by 20 rupees or so) but you can bargain.
Once you enter Brigade Garden, keep to the right corridor on the ground floor and it is the last shop on the corner: G-16.
Blossom is open all seven days from 11 am to 9.30 p.m. and the shop is actually even air conditioned on all days except Sundays.
PRADEEP SEBASTIAN
Photo: G.P. Sampath Kumar
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