I kid you not, boys and girls. Here’s what the ad with a black
borderline in the Mumbai Mirror of
Wednesday, 13 March 2013 (page 3, top left hand corner), said. And, I quote verbatim:
BOOKS BY WEIGHT
New &
Pre-owned Books
Buy
Books by the Kilo.
Rs.200/- per
Kilo for Children’s Books & Mills & Boon, Rs.100/- per Kilo for all
other Books.
Minimum Purchase
of ½ Kilo and In Multiples of 100 Grams there-of [sic]
All subjects
included
One million
books will be displayed during the course of this exhibition.
Venue:
Shri Sunderbai Hall
Nathibai Thakersey Marg, Opp. Churchgate Station
Behind Income Tax Office, Mumbai 400002
Tel: 95942 21040
Date: from Wed. 6th to Sun. 24th March
20013.
Time: 10 am to 8 pm
Sundays Open
CREDIT CARDS ACCEPTED
YOU CAN GET 9 LADYBIRD OR 7 PICTURE
BOOKS IN Rs.200/- A KILO
YOU CAN GET 4 FICTION OR 1 COFFEE
TABLE BOOK IN Rs.100/- A KILO
*We do not provide plastic bags please bring your own carry bags.
My
guess? A lawyer (if not full-fledged, then an intern) – not a copywriter – wrote
the text. (S)he lacked finesse, forgot to proofread (“there-of”). Also, please
mark the euphemistic legalese (“pre-owned” for “second hand”, a usage borrowed
from car trade). At least, they told a fair amount of truth if not the whole
truth. I noticed that some of the books on display had on the front fly page a
borrower’s record sheet, a familiar presence in library books. Also the pages
of a lot of books were on the verge of yellowing.
The
exhibition space was fairly well packed, a rare occurrence on a weekday
afternoon. The shoppers were mostly young, enthusiastically lugging their shopping
baskets behind them, jostling, pushing, jamming the aisles as most Indians are
wont to do. A majority were buying mass market fiction, children’s books and
computer-related books. In the former category, the best of the chaotically
scattered lot seemed to be Grisham and Crichton.
As for me,
after two hours of plowing through the tumult, I settle for three books, two
hard-bound and one paperback. The first one, Molly Weir’s Spinning Like A Peerie (Lomond Books, Edinburgh, 1999), is the
paperback sequel to Trilogy of Scottish
Childhood. http://bit.ly/10T508G">http://bit.ly/10T508Ga>.
The second book to catch my eye and
fancy was Joseph Roth’s The White Cities:
Reports From France 1925-39 (Granta Books, London, 2044). Roth was a
hotshot German newspaperman who quit the Weimar Republic and relocated in
France. His collection of essays (or, belles
lettres, in deference to their vintage) would be worth reading, I thought.
My third purchase was a quirky collection of misprints, typos and other howlers: Martin Toseland’s A Steroid Hit The Earth (Portico Books, London, 2008). None of my esteemed fellow shoppers would have spared a glance for my eclectic and weird choices, I’m sure. Well, well, well. C’est la vie.
My rich haul did not cost much. Tipping the weighing scale at 1.2 kg, it left my wallet lighter by Rs.120/-. The other shoppers in the cashier’s queue had much heavier loads to carry and pay for. This masterstroke of exhibition marketing was the brainwave of Butterfly Books. Only someone who deals in books by the container loads could have thought of selling them by weight. Other booksellers ought to follow suit with suitably modified baits.
