It's winter and the New York
weather not very welcoming; still the desire to attend a book auction in Manhattan was so strong that I drove from New Jersey in the cold.
I had earlier noticed several books of which I owned copies back in India. So I was
curious to check out their value. For example I had a gorgeous copy of
Coleridge's Ancient Mariner with Gustave Dore's superb engravings. A similar
copy, in excellent condition, was on display at this auction.
Though I had seen book auctions in Bangalore,
the way it was conducted in New York
was very different and quite complicated. The auctioneer received ever so many
phone calls from different parts of the country for certain types of books,
especially detective novels. Titles by writers like Ellery Queen, Dorothy
Sayers, HRF Keating, Jacques Barzun, PD James and several others were in
excellent condition; some were limited editions with the author's inscriptions.
Books in the auction were quickly sold to the highest bidder.
Unusual
experience
It was an unusual experience to be in the midst of
excited bidders. As it was an enormous hall, I could not closely follow the
method through which some bidders were deemed successful. However, my attention
was on those bidders who were interested in detective fiction. The auction came
to a close as I was trying to discover the successful candidates. I looked
dazed and was sitting next to an American lady, a successful bidder. She asked
if I was from India
and which part of the country etc. When I answered her, she invited me to see
her shop the next day.
“All the detective fiction... every time they come to
this auction room, I will always acquire them, whatever be the hurdle.” She was
the owner of the famous New York
bookshop, Murder Ink. When I visited the shop, I was charmed by its atmosphere;
it looked so much like an antiquarian bookshop: books neatly arranged in
shelves (unlike what I had seen years ago at Foyle's in London). As I entered, the proprietor sitting
at a prominent corner invited me in and made enquires about book shops in India. I could,
of course, purchase only two books a because of the expense. I had never
attended any noted auctions like Sotheby's or Christies in London.
Auctions in Bangalore
Book auctions bring back many memories from my boyhood
days. Often, my father, then a practising pleader in Andhra Pradesh, would get
a call to attend book auctions in Bangalore.
Those were the days of World War II. Many foreign families leaving India left behind their precious collection of
books with the auctioneer in Bangalore.
On such occasions my father would get a notification to
attend these auctions and invariably he would be the highest bidder. Father
would collect and store them in my grandfather's residence in Malleshwaram. This
happened quite frequently and father's clients in Kurnool
had no other option but to ask my mother when father would return from Bangalore.
A casual encounter with a retired director of the
Imperial Bank of India
was a turning point in father's life. This foreigner prompted my father to
start a bookshop in his garage, after having noticed father's exceptional
collection of books. Select was
ultimately born in 1945; the unique store house of rare and out-of-print books.
The writer is the proprietor of Select Bookshop, Bangalore.
Murder Ink, the mystery bookstore on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, is going out of business after 34 years, along with its younger sister store, Ivy’s Books and Curiosities. On Monday the owner, Jay Pearsall, posted a sign in the window announcing that Dec. 31 would be the final day.
“We’ve been having a hard time keeping up,” Mr. Pearsall said.
The list of suspects is long. The rent has been increasing by 5 percent a year and currently runs $18,000 a month, Mr. Pearsall said. A Barnes & Noble at 82nd Street and Broadway has been chipping away at business for years. Amazon and eBay killed off mail-order business and sales of rare books.....
The original Murder Ink opened in 1972 on West 87th Street as perhaps the first bookstore devoted to crime and detective fiction. Its founder, Dilys Winn, sold the store after three years to Carol Brener, who owned it for 14 years. In 1989 Mr. Pearsall bought it, and three years later moved to 92nd Street and Broadway.
