The city, then Calcutta, had been home to some of the first bookshops in India dealing with antiquarian material. Cambray, and Thacker and Spink came first, and just when they were sizing down, Kumars sprang up in the mid-1940s to keep antiquarian bookselling alive. Kumars was owned and run by Nirmal Chandra Kumar the city's most magnificent antiquarian and rare-book man who had never been sufficiently remembered, celebrated and honoured outside Bengal.
From 1945 until his death in 1976 Nirmal Chandra Kumar had run a rare book shop from his home. He was probably the first Indian bookseller to publish a rare book catalogue in the long tradition of all accomplished antiquarian booksellers around the world especially the legends Kumar had done business with - Quaritch and Maggs.
The city's bibliophiles, artists, luminaries, antiquarians and bohemians all frequented Kumars. Satyajit Ray, a regular browser here consulted Kumar when he was directing Shatranj ke Khiladi; at a London book auction, Kumar had bid for and won a priceless scrapbook on the 1857 Mutiny. Ray went on to pay his own little tribute to Kumar in the character of the encyclopaedic 'Sidhu Jatha' in the Feluda Stories.
Writes, Pradeep Sebastian in the book: The Book Hunters of Katpadi.
Pradeep Sebastian is a writer who himself is in immense love with books.
Neelambari Adigal and her young associate, Kayal, together run Biblio, a one-of-a-kind store of rare books in Chennai, specializing in modern Indian first editions. The lives of these passionate book women revolve around curious browsers, eccentric book collectors, private-press printers and the occasional thrill of unexpected discoveries of the antiquarian kind. On a book-collecting trip to Ooty, Kayal stumbles upon an incendiary manuscript, long thought to be a myth, purportedly authored by explorer and translator Sir Richard Francis Burton.
Almost simultaneously, a cache of priceless editions that looks like it could be from the 300-year-old library of one of the greatest book collectors the world has ever known, turns up at the bookshop. When it falls upon the two women to authenticate their finds, Neela and Kayal discover, quite suddenly, that their lives are more full of bibliographic intrigue than they could ever have imagined.
India’s first-ever Bibliomystery, The Book Hunters of Katpadi, is the book every lover of the written word has been waiting for. In the tradition of the greatest in the genre, it holds within its pages adventure, action, suspense and the sheer thrill of close encounters with prized print-on-paper.
Pradeep Sebastian has co-edited two volumes of essays, Mr. Naipauls Round Trip and Other Essays and 50 Writers, 50 Books: The Best of Indian Fiction. The Groaning Shelf and Other Instances of Book Love, a collection of his bibliophile essays, was published by Hachette India in 2010. He writes widely on the book arts and is a fervent collector of fine press books.
Details of the Book: Book Hunters Of Katpadi: A Bibliomystery. Author: Pradeep Sebastian. Published, 2017. Hachette India.