One of the threads of the planned bookshop is called Urban India. I mentioned some of the books I want to feature when I wrote about a course I taught at Temple University Japan. They are: Rana Dasgupta’s “Capital: A Portrait of Twenty-First Century Delhi”, Siddharta Deb’s “The Beautiful and the Damned”, Kushanava Choudhury’s, “Epic City” and William Dalrymple’s, “City of Djinns”.

The main criteria of including the books back then was accessibility via Western publishers, significantly limiting the field of potential titles. Alas, much of that restriction remains. Nonetheless, the lack of women writers in my original post is striking, and my shop’s thread must contain some of these underrepresented voices. I also regard these threads as fluid containers for the books. If I sell a book from within, I might replace it with a fresh copy, or with a different book altogether.

While I keep looking, of note are a short anthology of writing on Chennai dating back to the early 2000s edited by C.S. Lakshmi called “Unhurried City”, Rashmi Sadana’s “The Moving City: Scenes from the Delhi Metro and the Social Life of Infrastructure”, and Supriya Baily’s “Bangalore Girls: Witnessing the Rise of Nationalism in a Progressive City”.

Several academic books would fit this list but not my shop–at least in the beginning–mainly given excessive cost and difficulty in sourcing. These are: “India’s Contemporary Urban Conundrum”, “The Oxford Anthology of the Modern Indian City”, or this huge “The Indian Metropolis”. They’re obviously a little different in that they are more general readers on the urban condition, hence perhaps also a little off-topic for this thread. Another book that I had my eyes on but which is excessively expensive is “City Fictions of the New India” by Alex Tickell.

How do I present the threads in the shop? I am inspired by curated bookshops like Libreria in London (to be visited when next passing through) which present a lot of their material cover facing the audience–losing space on the shelf but driving home their curatorial vision and making the visit to the shop a lot more serendipitous.

I’m also thinking about printing out a page for each thread, containing a thread paragraph–something like:

“In the 20 years that I have travelled to India, its cities have mostly transformed beyond recognition, as the subcontinent’s population grew rapidly and migration to urban centers intensified. While increasingly India’s urban growth is occurring in second and third tier cities, the megacities continue to capture an outsize share of our imagination. I present here some portraits of these giant cities–often unflinching, unfiltered, and critical, but also affectionate and intimate.”

…and the 5-10 books with a short blurb each, something like:

“Rana Dasgupta’s “Capital”: The Delhi portrayed by Dasgupta is a city born out of the trauma of partition. The past is nothing to be nostalgic about, so its residents are most energetic about the future. The denial of important aspects of its long history, however, has also made the city strangely characterless.”

The big question is feasibility amid the effort, as well as consistency among the various threads. Worth mentioning here again the no-AI policy I have obliged myself to when it comes to the content aspects of the shop. It’s hence important to flag the significant work required to get this off the ground beforehand.

One mitigant is to simply pre-write some of these summaries and book blurbs before I even open the shop, with posts such as this. The other is to be happy to have the number of threads in the shop grow organically, with the rest of the catalogue presented in more traditional ways such as by topic and sub-topic.

When thinking about the spatial arrangement, 500 books organized in 20+ threads as well as thematically, it is clear to me that I might need more space than what the sheer and smallish number of books suggests. This has ramifications for shelving solutions and interior design.