The significant yet often elided distinction between the word and the page is what may explain the enduring charm of a used book. People buy used books and treat them as well as fresh ones simply because what matters more is the journey narrated by the words, not the journey which the book has gone through, writes Anubhav Pradhan
Reading is always a journey. When we pick a book, we bring certain ideas and expectations to it. We hope it will turn out to be this way or that, that it will satisfy us in keeping with what we look to get from it: Pleasure, wisdom, diversion. We all judge a book as much by its cover as by the proverbial words on the page.
But isn’t a book in itself a journeyIJ Writing, typing, editing, proofing, designing, printing, and conception and dissemination before and after, key processes framing the birth and afterlife of each and every book. By the time a book reaches a reader, considerable investment has been made in it — effort and resources as much financial as intellectual and emotional. A book is in every way a labour of love, which the concurrent fact of its being a commodity does nothing to detract.
Interestingly, most of us fail to see a book as a commodity when we think of it as the stuff of stardust and beauty. Part of this is due to the advertising and marketing blitz through which books come to us, their readers; each and every book is made to appear auratic, a thing like which there is none other. There is a lot of money on every kind of book, but the way it is presented to us glosses over the dominant financial undercurrent to magnify the love and determination which goes into a book’s making. A book, then, appears magical, as if there is nothing between an author’s conception and a reader’s reception.
But unlike most other commodities, this is not just a factor of clever advertising. Books, as repositories of thought, have always had a special place in human history. Across civilisations, books have been considered valuable for their capacity to breach the limits of corporeality and mortality, to give human thought a life far beyond the confines of human existence. Resultantly, the written word has been considered simultaneously divine and demonic in many religions and cultures, and books seen as sources of great power. If today we continue to think of books as imbued with an auratic quality, as having a quality of being which defies dilution or replication, it is as much due to advertising as due to this complex cultural history of language, writing, and printing.
But if all of this is true, how do we reconcile the prevalence of piracy with particular reference to the widespread belief in the auratic quality of booksIJ Almost all of us have owned or gone through pirated and/or second-hand editions of books without any sense of guilt. Yet, hardly any of us treat a pirated or used book differently from one fresh from the press. In fact, for many who love books, a used book may be just as valuable, if not more, than a fresh one. A used book has had a life; it has journeyed widely to reach its present keeper, and so appears richer for this history.
This is possibly why pirated and second-hand books continue to be popular despite doomsday predictions of pundits of various sorts. To talk of the approaching death of the printed word is, of course, a trite commonplace, but the fact that it is in itself instructive. The conveniences of the internet combined with the affordability of smartphones have, apparently, stunted our attention span, made reading an unnecessary drain on our increasingly limited time. Yet, multinational publishers put aside their rivalry and come together to sue a humble photocopy shop in Delhi for copyright infringement and damages. In India, there are more publishers today than a decade or so ago, when the death of print was first projected onto the horizon of the 21st century. There are more universities, more and more libraries, and an ever-increasing demand for books of all kinds regardless of the limited budgetary allocations for higher education. Books, and not just e-books, are clearly not disappearing any time soon.
In a round-about kind of manner, this is readily attested by the steady popularity of second-hand book stores and markets. If reading is indeed a journey, then reading a used book is a journey across corporeal as well as intangible bases of ownership; a book, when published, is owned by the publisher, the author, and the retailer. A second-hand or used book, however, has broken through this tripartite framework to belong to a series of owners, or keepers; it has seen various homes, various minds have gone through it, and is yet more likely to be read by a greater number of people.
The significant yet often elided distinction between the word and the page is what may explain the enduring charm of a used book. People buy used books and treat them as well as fresh ones simply because what matters more is the journey narrated by the words, and not the journey which the book has gone through.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in a used book market, where books exist as auratic beings shorn of much of their commodity value. To the keen lover of books, a second-hand market is a place of sin and temptation, a haven where the soul finds happy sanctuary. The shock and outrage which the supposedly more genteel amongst us routinely express — at books being sold by bulk, at books on pavements, at books sold in infringement of copyright — seem immaterial at the joy of finding a classic brought down to accessible limits by virtue of its weathered binding, or of an entire season’s reading list purchased in one go.
The tangible experience of being amongst books is considerably heightened in a used book market than in their supposedly more legitimate counterparts — there is, first and foremost, such a wide variety of books as will never ever be found in a single store. A used book market works essentially on principles of bulk; as commodities, used books are valued only by weight, by the condition of binding, by the many, extremely tangible factors of production which work to make them auratic in the first place. No other condition of publication usually matters, nor that of authorship; the best and the worst, so-called, may well be found cheek-by-jowl in the same condition.
There is, of course, order, an unwritten pattern which all booksellers in a market evolve and follow, but the challenge to our ingrained epistemic urge to organise is what makes a used book market or store such a healthy shock to the senses. The tyranny of logic, of neat disciplinary pigeonholes and smooth commerce is necessarily upended, if not suspended, in a used book market. Production, corporeality, is what matters the most; a book is worth its looks, and this emphasis on the physical is what makes going through a used book market and buying used books an essentially sensory experience. Touch and smell matter as much in buying a used book as does sight; in an inversion of auratic markers, the pages matter as much as the words on the page, the journey of the book during the deciding moment of sale being as important as the journey of the words.
This is significant, because journeying thus a book creates for itself a space more vital, more dimensional than the one to which it gets consigned at its first entry into the market. Used book markets, and stores, are necessarily hubs of flux; the only catalogues that there are the ones in the store keeper’s mind, and that vision of where what should be is what brings order to that mass of books. Of course, in some instances, the entire market is itself intangible; a fleeting moment of carnival into the mundane quotidian. Such is Delhi’s famous Sunday Book Market in Daryaganj, where busy commercial pavements give way to piles of books of all kinds and genres — classics from the canon, textbooks, pulp thrillers and romance, guides for entrance examinations, art and photography books, academic monographs, and so on. The fact that Daryaganj is the hub of publishing not just for Delhi but all of India makes the experience of buying used books from the book market there all the more ironical; this commerce happens often right outside the shuttered premises of the publishers who first brought these books into the world. In some cases, the arrangement is clearly a tacit one, as fresh books find a place of uneasy pride along with used ones.
Of similar — though hoarier — vintage is College Street in Kolkata. More properly stalls than stores, the establishments of College Street have kept generations of book lovers alive for over a 100 years now. Here too, fresh and used books share equal, almost symbiotic space, and the market on the pavement is flanked by publishers, colleges and universities, and one very iconic coffee house.
A microcosm of scholarship and publishing, a walk down College Street never ceases to astound; from life to birth to afterlife, the trajectory of a book’s journey is most apparent in the contained, yet vibrant world of College Street. Much more than Daryaganj, or perhaps any other market in India, the chances of stumbling across a forgotten first edition, or an autographed classic, at bargain prices are the greatest on College Street. After all, this market on the pavement is the biggest in India, a veritable part of Kolkata’s — if not Bengal’s — identity.
little compares, however, to the impact of Kerala Book House seen at first. Simple, unassuming, and housed not far from Maharaja’s College in Ernakulam, Kerala Book House stuns the unprepared visitor by sheer size and bulk of display. It occupies a shed better described as a middling aeroplane hangar, and tempts regulars and visitors alike with drop-dead discounts. Books are arranged in stacks and rows, and around every row a three to four foot deep pile invites the visitor to literally dig through to satisfaction. The variety is a little limited to pulp and the popular, with a few classics and almost nothing academic stacked on the sides, but even within this there is enough to enthral and satisfy the casual visitor looking to find happiness and joy for a year or so.
Of course, the most well-loved brick-and-mortar used book store in India has to be Blossom Book House in Bangalore. A cultural icon like none other, Blossom’s steady growth chart will put all the naysayers of print and reading to flight. It attracts visitors from across the urban sprawl that Bangalore has become, and gives very healthy competition to the almost dozen other bookstores in its neighbourhood. The Blossom experience always brings one to unexpected delights; being a brick-and-mortar store, it has a rudimentary categorisation and staff well-trained to know what will be where. like its humbler Kolkata counterparts, Blossom also presents the opportunity of stumbling across old and rare finds, books which have journeyed across continents and centuries into its air-conditioned environs. Shopping in Blossom entails going through high shelves of books of almost every conceivable variety, with the shopping baskets serving to accentuate the subtle, sly pun on the supermarkets.
Significantly, it is in undermining the supermarkets’ auratic quality that used book stores seem to perform their most important socially relevant purpose — they insert in an economy of instant and unending consumption, a vital space for exchange, a system almost of barter. In bringing down the value of a book-as-commodity, they allow for books to have a life and journey beyond the limits prescribed by their conditions of use. This delicate symbolism is key to understanding and appreciating the resilience of humanity’s innate urge to reuse as it works insidiously, almost naturally, to defy the logic of capital and consumption.
The writer works as the Senior Marketing Editor in a Delhi-based publishing house. The views expressed are his own