How scribblings enhance the value of second-hand cookbooks

KKS Murthy, the owner of Bengaluru’s Select Books, who recently passed away aged 95, it was after a gap of many years. He seemed quite unchanged, sitting amid the heaps of books in his now 80-year-old shop off Brigade Road. He recognised me at once and, without asking, directed me to a pile of second-hand cookbooks.

I rarely buy physical books now. You can tell me all about the joys of holding a printed book, and I’ll shrug and switch on the e-books app on my tablet or phone, with instant access to thousands of books, new ones instantly available, all easily searchable, with adjustable lighting and size. I also live in a humid Goa valley, which is rotting my old books.

But I still love second-hand books. Booksellers like Murthy who specialise in them are rare now, with the places where they congregated — Fort’s pavements in Mumbai, Moore Market in Chennai —mostly cleared away. New & Secondhand, in Mumbai’s Dhobi Talao, is a distant memory. But Murthy kept the flag flying for the kind of place where, instead of the purposive searching of regular bookshops, you could randomly sift through piles and find the one book which, through past owners and shops, was waiting for you.

The Australian chef Ben Shewry describes this in his memoir Uses for Obsession. He was in a second-hand bookshop in the late 1990s, an era defined by American chefs turning expensive ingredients into sculpted works of art. The books reflected this, beautiful and boring, until he found a plain paperback of David Thompson’s Classic Thai Cuisine.