Bookshops: Famous Book Store (New Delhi)

This past August my search for books in New Delhi led me through Connaught Place where many a bookshop can be found, and more variety than I imagine any quarter in any part of the world wouldn't dream of maintaining. The difficulty with second hand books in India is similar to that which I encountered in Turkey: due to heat and humidity, older books are warped, browned and spotted with mold. (Surprisingly, in the oddest backstreet shops in Istanbul I found many an old pulp anthology, including several Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and while all were dirt-cheap, most were unsalvageable due to decay.) Expecting to find variety in New Delhi, I was disappointed in my search for British editions of paperback anthologies, but impressed by the number and variety of bookshops available.

My time was limited, however, and while I'm sure plenty more books lie outside Connaught Place; I was only a few blocks away. Furthermore, additional bookshops exist in and around Connaught Place, including many booksellers who set up on the streets (and who, it is claimed by locals, sell pirated books that are often incomplete), and in about four hours I was unable to visit even the ones I knew about; my search having begun with this 2010 Hindustani Times article, and I managed to visit:

• BMP Books
• The Oxford Book Store
• New Book Land (Janpath Market, below Connaught Circus)
• ED Galgotia & Sons (B Block)
• Jain Book Store (B Block)
• Rajiv Bookshop (Palika Bazaar)
• Amrit Book Company (N Block)
• Famous Book Store (Janpath Market)
• Anil Book Corner (H Block)

My favourite of these was Famous Book Store, a hard-to-find little shop just outside the Janpath Market (where I tried to purchase a Superman shirt for my twenty month-old son, but they did not have baby sizes). The shop was packed full, mostly with novels and children's books. I was tempted to purchase some books by the likes of Shaun Huston and Ramsey Campbell that were quite cheap, but since I've decided to no longer purchase mass market paperbacks (with perhaps some exceptions of the anthology ilk), I passed. One reason I nearly left empty-handed was that a store employee was shadowing me throughout what should have been my browsing pleasure. It was irritating. He did, however, dig through some piles to pull out a few odd titles I wanted a closer look at.

One of these titles was 50 Crime Murder Mysteries and Detective Stories, published in 2007 by Indiana Publishing House, a publisher located in New Dehli whose official email addresses are with gmail and yahoo, and whose website expired on October 28th of this year. The anthology has no credited editor and a table of contents that includes mostly people I have never heard of, alongside the likes of Ross Macdonald, G.K. Chesterton, HRF Keating, and the Edwards Hoch and Gorman. It was wrapped in plastic and I wasn't able to peruse the contents or pages prior to purchasing, but at ₹195 (about $3) it wasn't much of a gamble. The production is inexpensive, with font I haven't encountered since I was in grade school; as though the pages are photocopies of newsprint articles. The shop did have other titles from Indiana House, mostly collections of authors whose works are in the public domain. Perhaps I should've purchased others, since they might now be extremely rare and valuable. If only I hadn't removed it from its original packaging! (I am not being serious here.)

In addition to my single purchase, the shop gave me a nice little cloth bag that fit the book perfectly (pictured at the top), and I took one of their business cards (above).