College Street ‘book fair’, too, draws city’s bibliophile crowd
Times of India | 3 February 2025
1234 Kolkata: Nestled amid iconic educational institutions, the pavements in College Street on Saraswati Puja morning witnessed Charles Dickens jostling for space with Yuval Noah Harari at the traditional Saraswati Puja book fair. Bibliophiles and casual book lovers thronged the area where even rare books were sold at throwaway price points.
On Sunday morning, school and college students at College Street, dressed in ethnic wear, were busy clicking selfies. A section of them, however, was busy looking for gems amid piles of second-hand books. "I was browsing books casually and came across Winston S Churchill's book on the second World War. The volume was being sold for Rs 120. I could not believe my ears when the bookseller quoted the price," said Mehak Anand.
Anand came to Kolkata from Mumbai to her friend's place near Park Circus. She heard about the bookshops at College Street and took a chance to visit the area on Sunday afternoon. "This instantly reminded me of the bookshops on Kalaghoda in Mumbai. They have the same smell of old and new books, and I loved to delve into that. The added flavour was definitely the Saraswati Puja celebration in the city," said Anand.
Over the past 15 years, Sk Haidar Ali has been displaying books at the mini book fair on College Street every Sunday. "On occasions like Saraswati Puja, May Day, and Independence Day, we display more books. We don't have any social media support to promote the event. But the book lovers in the city know when to hunt for a book," Ali said.
Sourav Chandra, a doctor with the SSKM Hospital, was busy browsing through a rare book he came across. Chandra studied medicine at the Medical College, barely a hundred meters from the bookshop on College Street. Over the past eight to nine years, he has been a frequenter of these bookshops. "I just found a biography of Sarat Chandra Das, an Indian scholar of Tibetan language and culture. He went to Tibet twice, and his book deals largely with his journeys. The book, published nearly 150 years ago, is out of print now," Chandra said. "However, it is not the first such book I found here. I bought books like Rushdie's ‘Satanic Verses' and a rare edition of Immanuel Kant's ‘Critique of Pure Reason' from this pavement," he recounted.
The books on display ranged from textbooks to classics, best-seller novels, management, and non-fiction, priced between Rs 20 and Rs 200.
Asim Hait, who runs a book stall next to the entrance of Hare School, felt that it is the joy of browsing through physical books that has kept these shops alive in the age of e-books. "People order books online these days and use Kindle. But book lovers have never stopped buying from us," Hait said.