AJITVIKRAM SINGH: Why I am shutting down my bookstore in New Delhi
In a few weeks from now, I will be bringing down the curtain
on Fact & Fiction, a small bookshop I started in New Delhi, more than 30
years ago.
It's not an easy decision to make, but it's no big deal.
Really. Bookshops shut almost every day around the world. For me, though, it is
the end of a long road. I have finally accepted this after denying loyal
customers for some while now, who have been hearing rumours, and can also see
my stock liberally dwindle.
I have been in denial because a part of me still longs to
see new books come through the door, believing it is business as usual.
Had I been left to my own devices, I would have continued
running a rundown bookshop into oblivion, bleeding till I could bleed no more.
But today I can't afford to run the bookshop. If I owned the
space, it would have been different. The act of mercy came by the way of a
change in Delhi Rent Control Act, 1958, delivering a decapitating blow, ending
my slow passage to irrelevance. I couldn't fight no more.
For the past several years, I have spent hours wondering
what has happened to my dream profession. Where have my loyal clients gone?
Where have the friendships, forged over the counter discussing the joys of
reading and discovering old and new books, vanished?
There was a time, not too long ago, when people would walk
into the store and confess how they nurtured a secret desire to run a bookshop.
(Perhaps they considered it a gentle way to retire among books and gentle
bibliophiles.) Today, they too have disappeared.
So, what have I earned after 30 glorious years at Fact &
Fiction? Memories that made for great life lessons.
It was good fun telling people I was in the book
trade simply because I loved books: I was an anomaly. I remember the
first question most distributors asked me when I started: How was I going to
choose the books? To most of them, my selection was esoteric. It didn’t take me
long to figure out that the trade I had chosen tended to be full of people who
had accidentally percolated into the business, mostly by birth. For most, it
certainly wasn’t about any love for books.
I chipped away for many years trying to create a niche:
Owning a small bookshop had some advantages. It forced me to be excruciatingly
selective about the books. This allowed the bookshop to be more eclectic, as
opposed to others who would house a collection thrust on to them by the
distributors. I have spent years hounding these distributors for publisher
catalogues, often salvaging them from their trash bins and then making small
procurement order, to try and get books that didn’t stand a chance of ever
being ordered.
And boy, it was sheer joy. It took me a long while, but slowly and steadily, the same
traders would inform me that a new lot of books had arrived in their
warehouses. I would rummage through strewn cartons spilling with books, trying
to figure out how many copies of what I could sell. The broad consensus among
publishers was to send me books no one else could figure out. Till date,
unsuspecting clients still walk in and ask where I get my books, why the
selection is different from other bookshops, and who chooses the books for me.
Some are still quite unconvinced that I got my books from exactly the same
source as every other bookshop in the city, and that I personally choose to keep
the vast majority of books out of the shop. Perhaps it reflects my biases.
Mostly, it's to do with being a reader, someone who grew up with his nose in
one too many, which put me in considerable advantage to transcend beyond titles
in a bestseller list.
I have always maintained that bookselling is an oxymoron:
Books sell on their own merit. Booksellers merely facilitate this by presenting
a good selection. Yes, you can hand sell a few books, point people to a
particular direction, make a few suggestions to your regulars. But largely,
everybody must make up their own mind. So the role of a bookseller, I believe,
can, at best, be described as a kind of curator. A function rendered redundant
today when every book is a mere listing on the internet.
What do I feel having to shut shop? In one word:
relief. A bookshop is an organic entity, a response to stimuli. With the
participatory stimulus gone, you are merely existing in a vacuum. Some advise
me on staying alive in a marketplace run by the internet. I ask myself: Am I
just prolonging the death throes or is it a gradual metamorphosis? I am rather
sceptical of my relevance in the current market scenario.
The city now has one less indie bookshop: A city that
has had too few bookshops to begin with, and hardly any noteworthy chain store,
the likelihood of another bookstore coming up and making a difference is pretty
slim. Especially in this current environment of reduced retail sale and high
rentals. On that count alone, it’s an irreparable loss. I maintain books are
highly tactile objects and cannot be sold on the internet alone. The art of
browsing and the serendipity of finding unconnected books are hard to emulate
in the virtual world.
The number of people who come in to find books, then to
compare prices on their smartphones, while the slightly sensitive ones merely
photograph the book and then order from home, only goes to validate my point.
The books, which customers take for granted, are there in the shop because of
booksellers’ perseverance.
What will always brings a smile to my face: Seeing a
generation of readers coming in with their children, and being told how the
books and the bookshop were an integral part of their formative years. They
actually thank me!
I did it my way: Now I take a deep bow with the greatest
humility, and utmost flexibility, and kiss it goodbye.
