Reviving community spaces and intellectual fervour is part of city planning

What is a city without a second hand bookshop? A second hand bookshop is a repository of books that their owners had at some stage in their life bought with great enthusiasm or received as gifts from their parents, aunts and friends, loved, read, and fondly marked and underlined with red, blue and black pens and pencils. Books that at another stage of their lives they no longer know what to do with. Books that they still love but cannot care for or do not have room enough in their now smaller flats to shelve. A second hand bookshop is thus a storehouse of a city’s collective sentiment and nostalgia for its past, for the past of its inhabitants and, actually, for the past of the entire world. A second hand bookshop is not only a gathering place for aged bibliophiles but for all—children, adolescents, young, men and women. It is as essential part of a community’s social space as are shops selling anything else. The beauty of a good, well stocked second hand bookshop is where booklovers can find what they cannot at a shop selling new books – books that are now out of print, books that are otherwise rare and scarce. This is a place where bargain hunts can still be made even in these times of internet that has made searching anything around the globe so much within the reach of everybody. In sum, a second hand bookshop is an absolutely part of a city’s cultural landscape.

However, over the years second hand bookshops have been pushed out of their pride of place in city centres and other key areas in almost every city of the world because of rising real estate prices that have attracted developers of new shopping complexes and malls. This has happened to such great of second bookshops as London’s Charing Cross and Paris’ Left Bank. Most shops in these cities are gone no one knows where. Even pavement second hand booksellers have disappeared. So much so, that today there is nowhere book lovers can gather or go out for a bargain hunt. Have not the cities become culturally poorer as a result? In India, we never had a large number of second bookshops in most cities, though there were, no doubt, a few everywhere even if rather inadequately stocked. Calcutta and Bombay of the old were exceptions. College Street in North Calcutta and its famous coffee house were once the intellectual hub of the city. The best minds of the city gathered there in the 1950s and even up till the 1970s. The streets were lined with numerous book stalls and the regular bookshops, though small, attracted booklovers, scholars, teachers and students not only from all over Calcutta but all over Bengal and even outside. One could find some real gems of books there on all subjects—poetry, fiction, philosophy, history, languages, archaeology. But, today the place is no longer vibrant. The intellectual fervour is gone. The kiosks are still there but now they are filled only with ordinary management and computer textbooks. In the old days, there were many private libraries in the homes of the bhadralok and other rich of the city as also with the many writers and men of letters of taste. The books in good condition have been bought by dealers and secretly sold to book collectors overseas. The city is now utterly bereft of any valuable books.

Like Calcutta, Bombay too had a flourishing trade in second hand books and so had Madras at one time. Age has taken its toll of classy really great collectible booksellers. Even the numerous pavement booksellers of the Fort have been pushed out in the name of urban improvement and beautification. Similarly, some beautiful Delhi bookshops too have disappeared over the years. There were not many, anyway. But even the few that were there have been nudged out by other more lucrative businesses. The Daryaganj Sunday book bazaar, which used to be held along the road leading from Daryaganj to Jagat Cinema, is, no doubt, still there but changed tastes have turned it into more of a kabadi bazaar.

Nowhere are city masters paying any attention to this loss or making any plans to revive the second hand book trade. In this respect, the Paris municipal authorities are a big exception that other cities would do a good to emulate. Paris architects and community planners have come up with new ideas on community re-drawing and renewal of small, local community spaces. The city authorities, keen on reviving the bookshops on the Left Bank, the intellectual centre of the city and the home of its large student and teacher community, have offered strong financial incentives to real estate developers to provide cheaper shop space to book shop owners. The developers are given additional floor space area, if and when they agree to sell or let out space on the ground floor to bookshops. This has brought back many bookshops to the area and the community space is certainly changing for the better.

In Delhi, the National Book Trust (NBT), the top central government body created to promote book culture in the country, has recently announced a scheme to hold day-night book bazaars in different zones of the city over the next some month. The plan, I believe, is to make a regular feature. This would go a long way in renewing book culture in the city. How good it would be if the NBT took the initiative in rallying together book lovers of the city to lobby the city government to offer some incentives to builders here too to create and offer space for bookshops emulating the Paris authorities.