Hey there.

This is about the people that love books. And bookshops.

It’s divided into three sections.

First Impressions — I’ve been lucky enough to travel quite a bit over the past few years and visit a fair few bookshops. India has a severe dearth of those, as I’m sure you know. I’ll share what I saw, how I felt, if anything interesting happened, and what books I got there. This is the only section I have material for as of this writing. The ones below are things I hope to write in the near future.

Store Tours — This is where I reach out to the people that run those bookshops and ask them to tell me about their store. How it came about, how it progressed, what they stock and why, their favourite details about daily life there. A lot depends on the kindness of people here.

Conversations with Booksellers — This is the essence of the project. I want to hear the stories of people dedicating their lives to books. Booksellers being my favourite people in the world, but also people who work with and around books, and maybe someday, people who write them.

I fell in love with books when I was about five or six. My first bookshop experience was a Scholastic book fair at my school. I grew up in a small town, pre-internet, at least in my neighbourhood, where that fair was the only time all year we’d see books like that. It was surreal. I looked forward to it all year, and I’ve been reading ever since.

I discovered the real thing fairly late in life, but oh, when I did. It was like letting a kid loose in candyland. I just could never get my fill, and bookshops became my haven.

I grew up a bit and got a job in sales that let me traverse at least half of this beautiful country. Wherever I went, I went looking for a bookshop. I’m sure you can guess that most places didn’t have any. Some few did, but they were businesses first, bookshops later. Run by people who saw books as commodities. But I also found the gems. Places run by readers. People who treated their trade as a bookshop first, who understood what a book might mean to the customer walking through their door. These are the people and places I cherish most in the world. And I wish, I sincerely wish, there weren’t so few of them.

I want to tell you about these places and these people. I only hope they’ll let me, and that I’m worthy of telling this tale.