A view of the Lawyer’s Book Stall on Monday. Picture by Biju Boro

Sept. 6: A legacy today rose from its own ashes.

A day after being reduced to cinders, the Lawyer’s Book Stall today took everyone by surprise by doing business, though symbolically, from a makeshift counter for over an hour this morning to keep the 62-year-old “show” going.

The proprietor and employees worked hard to see that the stall reopened this morning amid heaps of singed books at 10.30 am. Heeding to a call by the Association of Publishers and Booksellers, all other bookstalls downed their shutters to express solidarity with the historical firm that was completely gutted in a pre-dawn fire on Sunday. Four other shops — Gyandeep, Book Land, the Khadi Gram Udyog showroom and a stationery shop — were partially damaged in the fire.

Valuable in-house publications by the founder-publisher B.. Dutta Baruah and K.. Dutta Baruah have been lost in the blaze.

“Today we did business worth Rs 3,000. At any cost, we will not allow the institution to die, it will be business as usual from tomorrow,” said proprietor of the Lawyer’s Book Stall Bhaskar Dutta Baruah, hailing his employees for having worked overtime to ensure that the shop reopens.

Dutta Baruah said the extent of damage would be known by Tuesday evening. The bookstall and stocks in one of the two godowns were gutted in the inferno.

Thought the exact cause of fire is yet to be ascertained, the local residents of that area suspect an electric short-circuit as the cause of fire.

A bookstall owner said it was the invincible spirit of the Lawyer’s Book Stall employees that ensured its reopening today. “After what happened yesterday, nobody had expected the stall to open for at least some days, if not weeks or months. The enormity of the tragedy is yet to sink in,” he said.

Proprietor of Book Land, Binod Nath, said they had incurred losses to the tune of several lakhs of rupees as one of their godowns caught fire. Nath’s stall was established about 40 years back.

Most of the city’s booksellers and publishers are located in the Panbazar area.

Founded by a lawyer B.. Dutta Baruah in 1942, the bookshop mainly catered to the needs of law students in its early days, but soon diversified to other subjects.

Till yesterday, it had a separate section on law books, a legacy carried on for over six decades by the Dutta Baruahs.