For the bookworm in you

Second take

One of the ways independent bookshops edged out chain bookstores in America is by devoting attention to local authors. They hand sold books to their patrons, personally recommending a book or pointing out a new display of signed copies of the latest work by a local author who patronised the bookshop.

This seldom happens in our bookshops to an author and her work, unless it’s a book launch. If you are an author wandering through our bookshops, it’s mostly an anonymous, impersonal experience. One exception to this I can think of is at Bookworm, the secondhand bookshop off Mahatma Gandhi Road in Bangalore. It’s Krishna, the astute, gracious and attentive young bookseller behind the bookshop, who makes the difference.

I encountered this firsthand a couple of years ago, when he came up to me quietly one afternoon when I happened to be browsing, to ask if I would sign a few copies of my book for his customers. I was surprised by this for several reasons, one of them being I had never seen more than two to four copies (if that) of The Groaning Shelf in bookshops and now here was a small pile on Krishna’s desk. Why was he carrying so many copies of this title? I asked. “I’ve been recommending it to customers whom I know will like this kind of book, and also, you’ve been a customer here for many years, how can I not properly stock your book?” Until then I didn’t even know he knew I had that book out, and apparently he had been selling more copies of it than most other bookshops.

From then on, whenever I dropped in to browse, he would keep me updated about how my book was faring, and also give me news of how books by other local authors were doing. Made curious by my experience at Bookworm, I asked two local authors what their own experience of Krishna and his bookshop were. And though I hadn’t planned it that way, both writers coincidentally had just published detective novels set in Bangalore. “My association with Bookworm and Krishna,” Anita Nair told me, “began with another delightful experience restricted to the Shringar shopping complex located on M G Road. The best Chicken Ghee Roast (CGR) in Bangalore can be found in a restaurant there, and my discovery of CGR and Bookworm happened at the same time.

“I was browsing at the bookshop when Krishna came up to me and introduced himself and told me how well my books were doing in his store. It is always gratifying for any author to realise that their books have a decided presence in a bookshop. Thereafter, Krishna would periodically keep me informed on how my books were doing, what readers had said, etc. He is also a great fan of Inspector Gowda and has probably recommended and sold the largest number of copies of Cut Like Wound in Bangalore. In a time and age when bookstores are turning into clinical mausoleums, here is a bookshop and a bookseller who are keeping alive the romance of buying and reading books.”

Zac O’ Yeah, the author of Mr. Majestic, wrote to say, “I don’t think there are that many booksellers like Krishna around, who know local authors and keep track of their books. I remember once going to the shop, a few years ago, and I didn’t think he’d recognise me from Adam, but he jumped me immediately and told me how one of my books had sold 70 copies in a month. Another time I went there, I think he proudly told me that a book of mine had sold more than 200 copies (or, am I dreaming that figure?), but the bottomline is that it always makes me happy to step into a bookshop where the proprietor is so happy about being a bookseller. It’s very good for an author’s self-esteem. In other bookshops, one tends to feel a bit anonymous and one’s books disappear too easily in the general tamasha of magazines, toys, luxury watches, smoothies and all.”

Krishna had left his village near Mysore in the 90s to study and work in Bangalore. One of the first jobs he took was selling books on the pavement. He had always been drawn to books, but here in his daily transactions on the road, he discovered the second thing he liked about being with books: dealing with customers and their reading wants. He took pleasure in tracking down a book a reader had been chasing for a long time and placing it in her hand, or there was much satisfaction in a customer who felt pleased about getting a good deal over a huge pile of secondhand books. He learnt on the job what readers look for, and one day took the plunge and opened his own little bookshop.

He straightaway put together a team of excellent assistants, and as any long standing customer of Bookworm can tell you, it is here that you will find the deepest discounts on any book, used or new. “I started to notice that quite a few of my customers were journalists and authors,” Krishna told me, “and this third dimension to bookselling was a wonderful surprise: the privilege and fun of interacting with authors browsing at Bookworm, supporting them in any way I can, and being able to engage them in shop talk has now become one of the most stimulating and fulfilling aspects of being an independent bookseller for me.”