The Antiquarian Bookworm is a dedicated new space for promoting rare and antique books, some well over a century old on Church Street.
| Photo Credit: MURALI KUMAR K
Civilised cities have used bookstores. Great cities have antiquarian bookstores. Bengaluru has graduated from the former with the Antiquarian Bookworm, a classy annexe to the popular Bookworm on Church Street. Overlapping dreams have come to fruition here.
The dreamers are a fascinating trio – an author, an IT professional and a bookstore owner, with instant name recognition in the city. For the dream to come true, they had to come together, India’s Bookman Pradeep Sebastian, his friend Vice President and Head of SAP Engineering Academy in Palo Alto, V.R. Ferose, and Bookworm’s energetic owner Krishna Gowda.
In his delightful memoir of collecting rare and fine books, The Book Beautiful, Sebastian writes, “…don’t miss out on the many-layered, intoxicating pleasures of book collecting…. The intimacy you experience with books when you go from being a bibliophile to a book collector is heady and gratifying.” The trio’s passion project should see an increase in both categories.
Sebastian is – if I may use a cricketing analogy favoured by the mathematician G.H. Hardy – in the Bradman class where book knowledge is concerned. His books on books, including India’s first bibliomystery, The Book Hunters of Katpadi, are erudite starting points for collectors. Sebastian is an experienced collector himself, as is Ferose, who has loaned some of his specials to the Antiquarian Bookworm as conversation-starters.
Among these are a book signed and presented to Tagore by Gandhi, and another to Gandhi by Tagore. Antiquarian stores are, by definition, museums too. Here’s Origin of Species signed by Charles Darwin, Profiles in Courage signed by John F. Kennedy, and all around books signed, first editions and collectibles from fine presses. It is a bibliophile’s delight, and a collector’s dream.
About a decade ago, I was ushered in to the rare books room at the Strand in New York with some ceremony. To mark the occasion (for occasion it was), I bought John Carter’s ABC for Book Collectors for 25 dollars. I see that edition selling on eBay today for 132 dollars. I am not selling my copy of course, but I narrate this to make two points. One, that collectors often become dealers for the thrill and challenge.
And two, that that book, first published in 1952, is a must-have for all bibliophiles and potential collectors. It explains the terms and is as informative as it is entertaining.
The John Carter book, the essays of Pradeep Sebastian, and possibly The Gentle Madness by Nicholas Basbanes would constitute the inaugural lessons in the joy of books, and the collecting of them. You will find some of these at the new annexe in a section devoted to books on books. The great collectors, book thieves, scouts, the forgers all live in these shelves.
Graham Greene, a collector himself, has written with feeling on the subject. “The value of a collection to the collector,” he says, “lies less in its importance than in the excitement of the hunt, and the strange places to which the hunt sometimes leads.”
The game’s afoot.
Published – November 23, 2024 07:52 pm IST