One of city’s oldest bookstores, Select Book Shop, will turn 70 next month

If there was one stall at the Bangalore Book Festival that was frequented by the young and the old on the concluding day on Sunday, recounting their cherished memories of one of Bengaluru’s oldest bookstores, it was that of Select Book Shop. The shopowner, K.K.S. Murthy, was at the stall, speaking to most of his customers and recalling their associations over the last seven decades.

Select Book Shop will turn 70 this year and it’s not just the old books sourced from across the world that people have enjoyed, but also recollections of incidents by Mr. Murthy, and this attaches an “associational heritage value” to the bookshop today.

“My father, K.B. Krishnamurthy Rao’s, intense value and passion for the world of letters brought renowned personalities to our bookshop, including Sir C.V. Raman, Ruskin Bond, British writer and intellectual Philip Spratt, Mysore Dewan Arcot Ramasamy Mudaliar, R.K. Narayan, R.K. Laxman and U.R. Ananthamurthy. Playwright Girish Karnad comes even today looking for his choice,” said Mr. Murthy.

Even before the Independence, advocate K.B.K. Rao, a resident of Kurnool, had given up his profession for the love of books and had taken up book-dealership in Bengaluru, as the family belonged to Karnataka.

Select Book Shop was started in November 1945 in a small garage, off South Parade (now M.G. Road) but later shifted to the present location on Brigade Road Cross. “My father’s eye X-rayed the best titles from the rarest of book auctions. He would bring many books from Balepet Market in Bengaluru,” recalled Mr. Murthy, who as a 10-year-old would accompany his father to all these book markets. The turning point was when the Cohen Book Auctioneers on St. Mark’s Road associated with Rao when some American and British families left behind collections in their huge libraries for auction. A passionate Rao turned out to be the highest bidder. “And later we became richer following associations from Chester Allen Auctioneers, who were our neighbour when the shop was on M.G. Road,” Mr. Murthy said.

Mr. Murthy, who used to work for HAL’s Aero-Engines Department as the liaison officer, was posted at Pao, near Spain’s border with France, in the 1950s and his father goaded him to visit a second-hand bookshop in Paris. Mr. Murthy was surprised to get hold of a rare book on Jayachamaraja Wadiyar in the shop. His father presented the book to C.V. Raman who had come to the shop to invite Rao for Raman Institute’s annual day.

“My favourite book still remains The Old Curiosity Shop of Charles Dickens as my father’s bookshop was akin to the shop described in the book, as most of our the customers would agree. My son K. Sanjay is with me to take the heritage of books across,” says Mr. Murthy.

The Select Book Shop has been selling 30 books on an average a day for the last 70 years. The store started publishing in the 1980s and its 2013 book on Sir M. Visvesvaraya was a hit. The bookstore boasts a rare collection including the Right Honourable V.S. Srinivasa Sastri, autographed books of V.K.R.V. Rao and R. K. Laxman, and railway maps and old magazines of pre-Independent India. “I would rather refer to books as books, rather than call them old and new books. I hope book festival organisers understand the concept in this perspective,” says shop owner K.K.S. Murthy .