For some travellers, a guidebook is just an accompaniment, while for others it is the companion that gives them succour when they need it

Travellers are to tourists what drinkers are to tipplers. Travellers go out for a long haul; tourists for short breaks. Travellers buy guidebooks, tourists hire guides. Package tourists are a different lot altogether. They do neither. Everything comes ready made for them. They just see, listen and click photos. Travellers hate to be called tourists and so do I, because I take pride in placing myself in the first category. I take a long time preparing for a trip, sometimes as long as six months. I buy guidebooks, not one but several, and I buy maps. I pore over their fine print for long hours, underlining passages that interest me, striking names of places I wish to visit, marking numbers of recommended buses, dotlining bookshops I intend to look up, noting phone numbers of restaurants that I shall be taking out my wife to, putting asterisks along the names of restaurants recommended for their local touch, etc., etc. And, after all this, I tell my wife to give me a pat on the back. So pleased am I after all this labour of love!

One consequence of such meticulous planning is that every few years my travel bookshelf gets filled with guidebooks and maps. So, from time to time, I sell them. I don’t give them away for free because I believe people don’t value what they get for free. Well, you may ask as to where do I get my guidebooks from. They once used to come mostly from a secondhand bookseller in Delhi’s Shankar Market, who specialises in selling such books at heavily discounted prices. Many others have come from pavements of big cities like Mumbai, Bengaluru, Chennai, Kolkata, Ahmedabad, Lucknow and Jabalpur. Some were discovered in hill stations like Shimla, Mussoorie, Darjeeling, Ooty and Mahableshwar.

Perhaps, the most important collection I ever made was that of Murray’s handbooks of India, which afterwards was called Murray’s Handbook of 'India, Pakistan, Burma & Ceylon'. It was a collection any bookseller would be proud of. It was an unbroken collection from 1892 till 1962! Its first volume, the 1892 edition, came to me from TN Jaivelu, a well known second-hand bookseller in the Moore Market of the then Madras. He had two adjacent bookshops on the railway station side. He was a canny, extremely knowledgeable, big time bookseller in the 1970s, when professors and librarians from various American universities had their pockets bulging with PL480 funds. They were then buying books in heaps for their libraries. Jaivelu emptied large private libraries of lawyers, scholars and collectors of the old times, offering them prices they could have never imagined that their dusty, old books would ever fetch.

There was another bookseller of his type in Ahmedabad then. Dinkar Trivedi, who had a very well-stocked shop on Ellis Bridge apart from a horde locked up in his many almirahs, was another person who was no less knowledgeable. However, whereas Jaivelu specialised in academic and scholarly books, Dinkarbhai was more interested in large, illustrated folio editions of the 18th and early 19th centuries, which he sourced from the palaces of chieftains, rajas and maharajas of Kutch and Kathiawad, many of whom were then strained for money.

My Murray collection came to be built during the 1960s and 1970s when I got to travel to different parts of the country as a correspondent of a daily newspaper. Wherever I went, I visited secondhand bookshops and pavement bazaars. And, whenever I went on such a hunting expedition I found some real gems. Such gems were easy to come by those days, when rare books were really not so rare, though they were not aplenty either. Also, booksellers then were not so well informed or knowledgeable about the rarity value or prices of books. So, if one was willing to rummage through dusty heaps on the roadside, there was a fair chance one could find a gem.

Murray’s is a great guidebook. Murray was a London publishing house who saw their heyday during the high tide of the British empire as real imperial publishers. They started publishing guidebooks in 1836 or so. India was one of Murray’s big markets. They published their first India guides between 1859 and 1883 in four volumes, one each for the three presidencies of Bengal, Madras and Bombay and a fourth for Punjab and the northwest region. The first consolidated edition was published in 1892 and is very rare today. A complete set of Murray’s up to 1947 is still rarer. As a compendium of Indian history, culture, archaeology, art and architecture, it is unrivalled. It is with its help that I discovered my India. Jawaharlal Nehru’s Discovery of India was a great help too, but it is a book in a different class and category. Today, my Murray set is gone. I have sold it. The only copy I am left with now is from 1962, edited by Prof. LF Rushbrook Williams, a well-known authority on Mughal India. This copy has travelled with me to almost every part of India, every district, city and town, every place of historical, archaeological and cultural interest. It has suffered much over the years. Its pages are profusely underlined in red, blue and black ink, and zigzag pencil marks and scrawls all over. Many pages look callously dog eared and the spine and the red cloth of its binding have accumulated a lot of grime from the sweat of my fingers. Old age has loosened its spine and dented its corners. Several of its quires are giving way. But I love it. It is possibly my most intensely read book. I have read its pages so many times that by now I can open any page blindfolded, even in the dark of the night.

Recently, Murray’s 1962 travelled to Pakistan with my friends Madhu, Ashok and my wife. When in Pakistan, Madhu re-christened the book as Murray Sahib, and so it has now acquired almost a human persona.