Curtains for a bookish business

Raaja Bhasin

This was to be the first of several business ventures that failed. All of 11-12 years old, some friends and I decided to make use of my tolerably decent collection of books and comics and start a lending library. Our inspiration lay in the two shops on Shimla’s Mall that lent out books and tattered comics for a daily or a weekly charge.

As the collection was mine, I was entitled to designate myself as the boyhood equivalent of the managing director and chairman. I would collect the take, which was expected to be substantial, and this would be ploughed back into the business. Buy more books, that is. The corporate mandate — to create a jingle in hindsight — would have been to ‘educate, entertain and earn.’

An expeditionary force, consisting of self and a trusted partner, sallied forth to conduct a market survey. As surreptitious as untutored pre-teens, with information theft on their minds, we ventured into the two shops that hired out the aforesaid reading material. A week or so into the game, and after listening to the endless cries of, ‘those two are back again,’ and ‘see that they don’t steal anything’, the findings of our survey were ready.

Westerns — the gunfighter ‘Sudden’; the incredibly successful novels written by dentist-author Zane Grey; the artisan Louis L’Amour, whose books sold by the million, were what today’s sellers would call platinum or at least premium gold. (By way of another much-bandied phrase of today’s Internet politesse, ‘a gentle reminder’, all this happened in the early 1970s). These swashbucklers were closely followed by the Tarzans and Commando comics. It was not only blood and gore that prevailed; mushy Archie and squelchy love stories, the delight of world-weary teenagers, had a market too — but let’s leave that for another time.

The next step was to approach the board and principal shareholders — in this case the parents. The more I spoke, the wider my father’s grin became and my mother shook her head with a sense of resignation.

The big day was at hand. All books, comics and other readable sundries on hire had been pencilled on the inner title page with their charges. We had even added a rider and the loss of a book or comic entailed a mark-up on the print price. Our first customers were announced. Expectedly, these were my parents. With suitable solemnity, they chose their reading material and paid the due amount. They were followed by a couple of friends who had been embarrassed into becoming customers.

It only took a few days for the idea to run its course. As it came aground, it left a memory that still pops up — the cost of losing the most expensive book on hire was Rs 5.