The Groaning Shelf

Notes from a bibliophile on the romance of book collecting, the beauty of dust jackets, the lure of rare and first editions, the art of browsing in second-hand bookshops, the bibliomania of book thieves, movies about books, the inner life of a reader, the pleasures of bibliophily and of course, favourites.

The delightful genre of books about books which looks at the book as physical object, as a crafted work of art where its bibliographical aspects binding, typography, edition, condition, rarity matter as much as the literary content inside, has seldom been explored in Indian writing with the cultic devotion displayed over these little essays that capture the drama of bookish obsession, the joys and snares of the bookish life and the gentle madness that is book love.

I have spent the last hour getting the books down and now they are everywhere in the apartment: on the floor, in boxes, even on the bed. What I am looking forward to is the putting back you remove them in haste but you labour over the rearrangement. That familiar moment Walter Benjamin speaks of in Unpacking my Library when the books are not yet on the shelves, not yet touched by the mild boredom of order.