Every year, an uninvited man turns up at the Calcutta book fair with a bag and a sheaf of papers. He finds a place in a clearing between two shops, or on a stretch of pavement, and settles himself. For the next twelve days, he will try to persuade anyone who catches his eye to buy one of his slim pamphlets. He is K.C. Paul, the man whose belief that the sun goes round the earth still burns with an unquenchable flame.

Paul is not one of the six hundred-odd registered participants at the book fair who are able to afford a stall, or a table in the little magazine marquee. He is one among the countless many who throng the fair ground with their pamphlets, craftwork or pet peeves. And by and large, they are allowed to do so. Often, their connection to the commerce of books is tangential, to say the least. But they have become a familiar part of the landscape of the book fair, and the fair would be poorer without them.

Which leads us to the question, what sort of a fair is the Calcutta book fair? It is not a fair for trading rights in books, as is the case with the storied Frankfurt book fair. But Frankfurt too began very much as a retail book market such as Calcutta's. K.C. Paul would have felt right at home at the Frankfurt fairs of the early 17th century. Galileo published a monstrous advertisement for his Sidereus Nuncius and Kepler would himself be at the fair, gamely trying to sell his Rudolphinische Tabellen.

But the Calcutta book fair - reportedly the biggest retail book fair in the world - is taking place at a time when the brick-and-mortar bookshop is on retreat worldwide, and e-retail rules the roost. About a couple of decades ago, two predictions were commonplace about the future of the book: first, that e-commerce would replace conventional retail, and second, the e-book would replace the paper book. While the first prognostication has come to pass, the second has not. Over the last couple of years, there has been a resurgence in the number of printed books, and e-books have registered a dip. It is too early to say whether this trend will hold, but certainly, the rumours about the demise of the printed book - so confidently forecast by Marshall McLuhan and his ilk in the 1960s - have been greatly exaggerated.

This is even more the case with non-English Indian-language publishing. While a new generation of English-language readers prefer to read on Kindle or other hand-held devices, that is not the case with languages such as Bengali, where the relative economies of scale still make the printed product an affordable commodity. The low prices also mean that there may not be a sufficient margin on the cover price to make e-retail a viable option. Thus the rationale for the brick-and-mortar bookshop is still a compelling one for this sector of publishing.

But this is where delivery mechanisms have largely failed the customer. The sad truth is that there is really no bookshop of international standards in the city, leave alone in the rest of the state. Other than Seagull, there is nothing remotely like, say, Strand in New York, City Lights in San Francisco, Shakespeare & Co. in Paris, or for that matter, Higginbotham's in the southern states. College Street, with a few exceptions, is devoted to the text-book market while certain big publishers and their outlets stock only their own books. All this makes the book fair the only worthwhile retail experience for the book-buyer, crammed into a dusty, sweaty 12-day package every year.

My first trip to the book fair was when I was in school, in 1978, when my mother and I took a train from the suburbs to the city. Four decades later, this is still how it is for a large number of buyers from the districts and the suburbs. There is of course a flourishing network of book fairs in the districts, but not all publishers are able to go there. Take, for instance, the publishing enterprise I am associated with, Jadavpur University Press, the publishing arm of the university. Owing to our limited human resources, we are able to participate fully in only the Calcutta book fair. At the same time, we are acutely aware that it is in the districts where most of our readers are. For most such readers, e-retail has come as a lifeline, especially for academic titles which have a more specialized readership.

Over the past few years, I have participated in the Calcutta book fair as a seller rather than a buyer. In between sitting behind the counter of the university stall, my staff and I have had to be content with intermittent guerrilla raids on other stalls for our own buying. There is a peculiar rhythm to the buying that we have noticed. Since the fair begins on the last Wednesday of every January, the first few days see sluggish sales as people have not been paid their salaries. As soon as the fair tips into February, the sales begin to pick up, reaching a crescendo during the second and last weekend.

One sees two kinds of buyers at the fair - those who prefer to browse, and those with very specific needs. The latter category tends to be dominated by guardians of school-goers, who seem to have somewhat fixed ideas about what their ward should read. A university stall is not where you would expect them to fetch up, but they often do, and are disappointed when they do not find what they are looking for. This seems to suggest that there is a huge gap in good writing for children - once you are done with your Rowling, Blyton, Shirshendu, Hergé, and perchance Leela Majumdar, what next? Bengali publishing, in particular, needs to do much, much more for younger readers. Simply reprinting the old favourites - which seems to have been the flavour of the month for the past few years - is simply not enough.

Finally, and most importantly perhaps, the book fair must not be seen as a space which is craven and susceptible to arm-twisting. Unfortunately, this has happened more often than one would like, with writers being disinvited and book launches cancelled for 'security' reasons. If the Calcutta book fair has to grow and flourish, it must provide an ecosystem which makes no concessions to bigots and vested interests. Otherwise, it runs the risk of going the Frankfurt way in the 19th century, when the fair became dominated by unscrupulous and frivolous publishers, and became an event of a regional character.

The author teaches in the Department of English, Jadavpur University, and is director, Jadavpur University Press