The friendly bibliophile who also sold books

If you were a bookworm in Bengaluru in the 1970s, ’80s and right up to 2009, you wouldn’t have missed brief chats with TS Shanbhag.
The short, balding man sitting behind piles of books on a small table at Premier Book Shop off Church Street would abidingly welcome you with a smile. All around were books and more books, from ground to ceiling, hardly allowing you elbow-room, let alone browse.If your last couple of purchases were of Latin American fiction, you might have heard him call out from his chair, “How about Laura Esquivel? There’s this one called ‘Like Water for Chocolate’…” Or if he knew you liked urban history, he would suggest, “There’s a reprint of Fazlul Hasan’s book…”
Personalised curating of books happened that early. What’s more, you got a 20 per cent off. So, if you had walked in looking for something specific, you would leave the stall with two more of what you liked. And, because this was a shop that stacked stuff for the contemplative reader, he was so popular with the city’s literati. His rare treat of books drew appreciation from Girish Karnad, UR Ananthamurthy, Ram Guha, Mahesh Dattani and many others. At a special lunch hosted by Guha to mark 30 years of Shanbhag’s store, young and old readers shared anecdotes about their unique experience of buying books there and interacting with its owner.
Everything about Premier’s — as it was known — was unostentatious. It didn’t have a neon sign; its glassfronted door was plastered with sundry posters about book readings or performances by amateur theatre groups. There was no hint of frippery in the interiors too. Newcomers might have frowned at the “lack of order”, but if asked Shanbhag, they would see how familiar he was with the heaps: pulling out an Annie Proulx from the row behind the Penguin classics and dusting off an old copy of a Wisden from the top of a Sports cluster.
Shanbhag kept himself abreast of the latest via the book review sections of newspapers and magazines, apart from following a few authors himself. Camus was a favourite. So were some cricket books. But essentially, he was a man who was fond of books and readers. It isn’t that he was only selling books. He loved meeting people who read.