Take them home,” says Nitai Saha, the owner of Bookshop in Gariahat. His shop comprises a single bookshelf. “If you don’t like them, you bring them back,” he adds.
Saha stands perched on a ladder, dusting the upper shelves. Two girls, dressed in crop tops and flared pants, are leafing through a Colleen Hoover volume. It Ends With Us has even found a screen avatar starring Blake Lively, no less, and the film’s poster is on the book cover. “This one is doing brisk business,” Saha mumbles. But the girls put the book down and move on.
Bookshop is one of the many stalls around the entrance to Gariahat Market. The books never seem to leave the shelves. Or so it seems until Tapas Kayal, owner of another such stall, B.K. Book Traders, tells his story. The books in his shop may or may not find readers, but they travel to popular film and television show sets.
B.K. Book Traders stocks books on baroque painters, the Guinness Encyclopedia of Warfare, books on jazz music, vintage car models…
These curious collections rarely find buyers among the regular shoppers of Gariahat. They are destined for something bigger. “You would have seen them in films,” says Kayal.
“Only a month ago, I had lent 100 books to the film people,” he adds. He points to a black hardcover edition of Cinema Year by Year 1894-2000. Which film should one look out for? Kayal shrugs. It is of no interest to him. “When the film people come to us for books, sometimes even they don’t know what it will be used for,” he continues.
“Film people” seems to be the moniker for anyone in cinema, television and
theatre too.
The books travel in groups. Every order comes with a memo. It takes 200 to 500 paperbacks to fill a slim bookshelf in a drawing room set. Ten hardcovers are all one needs for a centre table shot.
B.K. Book Traders has been in business for almost 60 years now. The Kayal brothers inherited the shop from their father Bishnupada Kayal.
“We have been lending out books for the past 20-25 years now,” says Kayal. The nameless stall adjacent to it is run by Mrinal Kanti Mondal and dates back to the 1970s.
While B.K. Book Traders is a treasure trove of rare hardcovers, Mondal’s shop has the latest picks — More Days at the Morisaki Bookshop, Before the Coffee Gets Cold, Normal People, Beach Read. Then there is the Bonophool Rachanabali in Bengali, Tagore’s essays and law books. In Bengali serials, it is quite the trend for protagonists to play lawyers. And that’s why law books are always being rented out in bulk.
A middle-aged man with glasses and a moustache, Mondal is perpetually fussing over his collections and pulling books out of thin air for customers. At the mention of film people, he gives an exasperated look. “I don’t like lending books to these people anymore,” he says.
Then he lists his grievances. If they borrow 500 books, they will return 450. On a film set, no one keeps track of books. Anyone can pick up a copy and take it home and the bookseller, who has built his collection through the years, is the poorer for it.
Nitai Saha explains that when it comes to book-renting, everything comes down to book covers. No one would blink an eye if the pages were blank.
“We get orders by book size, colours and sometimes by language,” says Saha. When they don’t have a particular book, they go to the Internet, pull out the cover, print it, and stick it on to a random paperback.
Old paperbacks of Nora Ephron, Nicholas Sparks, Cecelia Ahern and Sidney Sheldon with yellowed pages stand shoulder to shoulder on these shop shelves. Saha says, “They often go out together because they are of the same size.”
To borrow and tweak a lyric off Nancy Sinatra: “These books are made for walkin’/And that’s just what they’ll do/One of these days these books are gonna walk all over you...”