Washed laundry is drying within the porch. The bungalow really appears extraordinary, right here in Gurugram’s Sector 14. A jaali door opens right into a hall illumined within the afternoon mild. Recognizing the staircase inside provides the primary jolt. It’s affected by neat stacks of books. Up the steps, the veranda is wholly filled with books. So is the drawing room. So are the 2 bedrooms. The kitchen, too. Books declare beds, sofas, tables and chairs.
This personal library is the work of a lifetime. (HT Photograph)
This personal library is the work of a lifetime.
At 84, the antiquarian bookseller Vijay Kumar Jain is warming as much as the theme of retirement. His lengthy relationship with “old, rare books on South Asia in general and India in particular” had begun within the Nineteen Sixties. Regularly, the gathering turned famend. Bibliophiles from the world over would go to his ancestral mansion within the city’s Sadar Bazar to view the prized editions. After the household bought the outdated home a decade in the past, Vijay Kumar moved the gathering to his present deal with. At present, the books inhabit the bungalow’s first flooring. He, with spouse, Nisha, and their household, inhabit the extra navigable ground-floor rooms.
Attentively waving an arm in the direction of his treasured piles of hardbounds, the mild-mannered host murmurs softly: “This section is all partition, Punjab is over there… that’s Bengal… here is Gandhiana…” The primary editions embody a number of, however not all, of the 100 volumes of ‘The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi.’ A primary version Nehru is stacked tight in a shelf — its opening web page bears the seal of ‘Kitabistan, Allahabad.’ ‘The Jews of India’ lies near ‘The Aryans in Iran and India.’
Smiling below his bushy moustache, the e book collector recollects the cross-country excursions of his youth, visiting collectors and sellers in varied cities, plus the weekly excursions to Delhi’s legendary Sunday Ebook Bazar.
Through the early days of struggles and uncertainties, he would spent hours making ready the catalogues of his new acquisitions, the copies posted to school libraries and analysis students worldwide. Then got here the day when younger Vijay acquired his “first fat order.”
Vijay Kumar had 5 brothers. All have handed—one was Ansari Street bookseller Ramesh Chandra, who operated independently.
Strolling slowly from one room to a different, the aged gent pauses to gush over good-looking bindings. He picks up the yellowed entrance web page of the three April, 1924 version of ‘Young India,’ a journal that Gandhi edited.
Lastly, settling down right into a chair, he grows sentimental. “When I hold an old book, I feel ajeeb sa anand, a kind of mental sakoon.”