A first walk through Boi Para on College Street
Pavement stalls, publishers’ offices and the coffee house upstairs: how to browse Kolkata’s book street without getting lost.
Behind the counter: how we buy an old library
A day with the buying team, sorting a retired professor’s 2,000 books in Shyambazar.
Every few weeks someone calls about a family library. Usually it is a parent or grandparent’s collection, and the family wants it to go somewhere it will be read. We visit, look at every shelf and make an offer for the whole lot.
Last month it was a retired history professor in Shyambazar: just under 2,000 books, most of them in good shape. Two of us spent a full day there, pulling each book, checking the condition and sorting into three piles: shop stock, books for our free reading corner, and books that were too damaged to sell.
We price old books by condition, edition and how often they are asked for. A first edition in original boards can be worth twenty times a later reprint. We tell the family what we expect to sell the best books for, and the offer reflects that.
It takes about a month for a library to reach the shelves, because every book is cleaned, described and checked again. The professor’s books start appearing in the Old and rare section this week.
