Call of the wild: Children take a close look at exhibits in the zoological section of Birla Industrial and Technological Museum. Picture by Sanjoy Chattopadhyaya

For generations of book-lovers in Calcutta, foraging through books in that mecca of the bibliophile, College Street, carries memories. Once College Street used to be one of the few haunts in the city for books, with Gol Park and Free School Street as alternative venues.

The choice is much wider for today’s young people, with stores like Starmark and Crossword providing a one shop stop for books ranging from the Goosebumps series to ancient Greek literature. Most of the youngsters today are deprived of the flavour of old book hunting. Mansoor Alam, who has been selling books for more than two decades at stall No. 6 in College Street, said: “Young people still come. But they look more for text books, not fiction.”

“I mostly buy second hand music books from College Street, since they are expensive to get first hand,” said Tanmoy Das Lala, a student of St Xavier’s Collegiate School.

Buying books at second hand is a practice where money is only one aspect. It is more to do with unearthing rarities: an out of print book, or the first edition of a best-seller or a classic.

Inam Hussain, who studies English at Jadavpur University, has a fine collection of comics acquired from the area around Gariahat-Gol Park, another haunt for second-hand books, though not on the same scale as College Street. “I used to come here to buy old Richie Rich, Batman and Archies comics. They never cost more than Rs 10.”

The rock music buff has also managed to unearth some old issues of RAVE. He has treasures like the 567-page copy of The Giant Book of the Supernatural edited by Colin Wilson for Rs 80 and Video Rock with “coloured photographs” for Rs 40 to show for his patient foraging.

An old book carries its own history — whether of the publishing house or of the chain of owners it has passed through.

Does it irk him to find a book inscribed by a stranger’s initials, to turn the page and come upon his/her notes along the margin? For Tanmoy, the answer is a firm negative. “The books become mine once I buy them. I love the smell of old books, the feeling of it having passed through hands other than mine.”

And there are the quirky owners who leave marks of originality on books: “I have a book that has the legend ‘Handled with care’ written on it,” recalled Inam. “The only problem with buying old books is that they are sometimes damaged. The copy of The Diary of Anne Frank, which I bought recently, had some pages missing,” he said.

For Tanmoy, old books have archival value. Collecting old books is a practice that runs in their family. “My parents shopped for old books when they were MBBS students. Some of their books are still there in the house,” he said. He has a late 19th century edition of composer John Field’s Nocturnes and a copy of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina that was owned by his great grandfather once.

But the practice is on the wane today. With less time to spare and more disposable income, stores like Landmark and Crossword are the preferred stopover for youngsters.

“Sales have been going down for the last 10 years. There are fewer people wanting to read fiction. We have to balance it with reference books. People don’t have the patience to search through books now,” laments Alam, the book-seller at College Street.

Romila Saha

Only Connect Abhijit Gupta

What to name a rising star

Just when you thought it was safe to go out again, here comes another instalment of Only Connect, trailing vapours of extraterrestrial light. Having pretty much run out of earthly things to write about, Only Connect has had to take a sabbatical 20.4 light years away, on Gliese 581. Thanks to the publicity given to the matter, it is now well known that Gliese 581 is a red dwarf and the brightest star in the constellation Libra. More importantly, it has three planets, one of which — 581c — is considered to be earth-like in many respects.

All this is very gratifying, but since the planet is a small matter of 20 light-years away, we are not about to reach it in a hurry. So Only Connect has been wracking its brains about other matters of pith and moment, such as why the planet in question is called Gliese 581c. Doesn't roll quite smoothly off the tongue, does it? Which leads us to the larger question: who names stars, and after what principle are they named? Can I have a star or a planet named after myself?

Thanks to the ever-trusty Wikipedia, one learns that Wilhelm Gleise was a noted astronomer who died in 1993 and is best known for his Gliese Catalogue of Nearby Stars (www.ari.uni-heidelberg.de/aricns/gliese.htm) From this starting point, Only Connect swam into the fascinating world of star catalogues. It seems that the first person ever to compile a star catalogue was the Chinese astronomer known rather appropriately as Gan De (4th century BC), also known as Lord Gan or Gan Gong (If you think I am making all this up, see http://en.wikipe-dia.org/wiki/Gan_De). Unfortunately, both his seminal works have been lost.

Gan De was followed by such worthies as Hipparchus and Ptolemy, but their catalogues are no longer in serious use. However, the two catalogues still in use are by Johann Bayer and John Flamsteed. In 1603, Bayer produced an extraordinary book called Uranometria, which had 51 full-page copperplate engravings of Ptolemaic constellations.

There is a high-resolution digital version of the book available at www.lindahall.org/services/digital/ebooks/bayer and I urge all book-lovers to visit the site. It is one of the most beautifully produced books that you will ever see, with full-page grids of star positions with reference to the earth. There are a total of 1,200 stars listed in Bayer’s catalogue.

How did Bayer go about identifying and naming his stars? It seems he sailed extensively, even to the southern hemisphere. He assigned a lower-case Greek letter to every star he catalogued, to which he attached the Latin name of the star’s parent constellation, giving rise to names such as Alpha Tauri, or Alpha of the bull. Though he failed to give his name to any of the stars he observed, there is a crater on moon named after him.