The evergreen allure of used books

In July, I was in for a rude shock. More than half the year had gone by without any warning, and I was nowhere close to achieving my goal of reading more books this year. So in a bid to avoid wasting whatever remains of the year, I promptly walked to one of the city’s most popular book stores. After a quick browsing of the latest books and bestsellers, however, I found myself gravitating towards the “used books” section, which seemed to beckon me with a mix of nostalgia and an ethereal charm. Without realising, I was rediscovering the evergreen allure of used books.

Used, or “pre-loved” books, as I like to call them, have a quaint, endearing, old-world charm. The yellowing pages, often embellished with dog-ears that served as bookmarks, add layers of character to these books. Then there’s the distinct smell that comes with old books — a simple chemical reaction, according to science, but a fragrance that can captivate any bibliophile in an instant.

The management professional inside me also sees several material benefits with used books. They are often cheaper than new editions. Additionally, used books often come with certain phrases highlighted or underlined by previous readers and owners. If one is lucky, one may even find cute, hand-written notes on the margins. In today’s time and age, when attention spans are reducing with every minute spent on screens, this is especially useful. Moreover, with cover art becoming more impersonal and often generated by artificial intelligence, older, used books have book jackets that feel more personal and in most cases, outright beautiful.

Growing up in Chandigarh, I would rush to the neighbourhood second-hand book store every Monday using my weekly allowance that I received from my parents to learn some financial discipline. While this pocket money could not buy me new books, it was enough to buy second-hand copies of Hardy Boys detective novels, and countless books from the Enid Blyton series. This later evolved into amassing collections of used books written by Jeffrey Archer and Ken Follett, before engineering and management subjects such as electromagnetism, wireless communication, marketing, and strategy started adorning my bookshelves in later years. With the advent of online book stores, visits to the neighbourhood second-hand bookshops were replaced by delivery of discounted, new books right at our doorstep. Most of us soon forgot about used book stores, and they disappeared into oblivion except for a few stores in Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, and Kolkata that have survived this unfortunate test of time. However, the online marketplace can never match the charm of a book store, especially used book stores.

In a renewed list of resolutions that I drafted for the rest of the year, one trumps all others — visiting a used book store at least once a week, even if I have no intention of buying anything. I have realised that just the sight and smell of books, especially used books, is enough to calm the storm that often brews inside me after an exhausting week in the corporate world. This has also given me a chance to explore new locales in every city I visit, including College Street in Kolkata, Colaba in Mumbai, and the bustling Daryaganj market in the heart of Delhi.

As a cherry on the top, I recently bought a used copy of Gabirel Garcia Marquez’s novella No One Writes to the Colonel. Apart from the usual dog-ears and hand-written translations of some Spanish phrases, I found the owner’s name in the book, with a date-stamp from 1992 — the year I was born. With some quick sleuthing on Google and an audacious attempt to connect, I successfully forged a pen-friendship with her. She now calls Iceland her home. This is one gift that even the most heavily discounted online book stores can never get me.

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