Making a mark in book biz

By Willie Gordon Suting

The Nobel Prize winning Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda, once said, “It is up to you to dig out the pearls from the ocean”.
One such pearl that goes by the name Bookmark Sahaki lies hidden in one corner of the city that many tend to overlook.
A brainchild of Sambha Lamarr, Bookmark Sahaki came up at Nongrim Hills, only five minutes’ walk from Fire Brigade,in 2006 and through the years it has remained sui generis among other bookstores in the city.
Lamarr was a voracious reader interested in all things literary who nurtured and nourished the store for the avid readers of Shillong. She died on March 25, 2016, but left behind a legacy that attracts bibliophiles with its diverse and rich array of books.
Hansel Shabong, the 46-year-old proprietor, says “Even after the demise of my wife, who was co-owner, sales have not diminished. This is a slow but steady business.”
The book business is slow indeed, especially in a city where the number of readers is less. Also, many books are either available online or home-delivered at a discount.
Yet Lamarr, and now Shabong, ensured that the ambience remains vibrant and tempting to both serious readers and casual buyers.
As one enters the brown polished wooden door, the green tile staircase leads up to the shop, brightly painted in hues of maroon, blue and yellow, where different types of books are divided into separate sections.
There is the classics section, the Northeast section, the contemporary fiction section, children’s section, encyclopaedia section, self-improvement section, home décor and cookery sections. The bookshop also sells stationery items.
One can simply unwind on the yellow and blue hand-shaped sofas and browse through novels to get a feel of stories. Coffee and tea can also be ordered in the shop.
In the classics section, there are rare gems, books like Notes From Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky, A Confession by Leo Tolstoy, Yevgeny Onegin by Alexander Pushkin, The King Amaz’d A Chronicle by Gonzalo Torrente Ballester, The Three Cornered Hat by Pedro Antonio De Alarcon, The Book of Good Love by Juan Ruiz, Merlin and Company by Alvaro Cunquiero and The Bringas Woman by Benito Perez Galdos, among others.
In the contemporary fiction section, the bookshop has its rich collection of world fiction books like No OneWrites

To The Colonel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, The Vegetarian by Han Kang, Americanah, Half of A Yellow Sun and Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Aphrodite by Isabel Allende, Honour by Elif Shafak and After The Quake, Men Without Women and Absolutely on Music by Haruki Murakami.
Literary prize winning books like Paul Beatty’s The Sellout, David Nicholls’s Us, Ian Mc Ewan’s Atonement, Kurt Vonnegut’s Hocus Pocus and Armageddon, Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy, Nadine Gordimer’s My Son’s Story, Paul Scott’s The Jewel in the Crown and Margaret Atwood’s The Tent can be found in the bookshop’s many shelves.
The Bookmark Sahaki, in this technological age of Kindle, e-books, Amazon and Flipkart still has a certain charm that can beguile us. There is some rewarding feeling on having discovered a book by ourselves through reading its first chapter in a bookshop. So there would always be a sense of achievement on having touched a book and reading some of its contents.
At any time of the day, one can spot readers pouring into Bookmark’s vast collection, which also includes contemporary Indian fiction with books of writers like Salman Rushdie, Jhumpa Lahiri, Upamanyu Chatterjee, Amitav Ghosh,Shashi Deshpande, Anita Desai, Vikram Seth, Kiran Desai,Tarun J Tejpal, Manju Kapur, Shashi Tharoor and Chitra Banerjee Divakurni.
The bookshop also organises book releases. It was in the shop that books like Shadow Men by Bijoya Sawian, 28 Poems by Verrier Elwin, Highway 39 by Sudeep Chakravarti, Lunatic In My Head by Anjum Hasan, The Jewels’ Daughter by Nina Harkness, A Point of View by R.G Lyngdoh and Letters of the Street by Jasper Elias were released.
The Northeast section has books of fiction and non-fiction about the Northeast.
“There is good sale on weekends. We have regular clients and some also from Guwahati who come holidaying in Shillong,” says Shabong.
When asked how hard it is to look after the business single-handedly, Shabong said the responsibility is immense, especially when focus is both on the quality of books and revenue,but the zest to propagate the habit of reading among the youth in Shillong keeps him going.
Bookmark’s exemplary endeavour has become an inspiration for others in the business in Shillong.
Buddhadeb Chaudhuri of Chapala Bookstore says the store’s new outlet on Keating Road may come up with a similar arrangement like Bookmark.
“We are planning in future to make a sitting place there similar to Bookmark Sahaki,” he said.
Unlike Bookmark, other stores in the city also sell course books as “textbooks always sell more, but the sale from leisure books is okay”, says Chaudhuri.
Innovations like the Bookmark’s not only help in hedging business in today’s competitive market but also encourage reluctant readers to enter through the wooden door and sift through books. Perhaps one among them is a potential bibliophile.
Other bookstores, most of which are small businesses with little resources, lack such innovations and hence face the heat of fast-evolving technology and fail to have a widespread appeal.
Sujit Singh, proprietor of National Book Agency, said Kindle and e-books are eating into profits earned from book business.
He admitted that innovation is necessary to attract young readers but said space constraint is a problem for the store’s expansion.
“Reading is one of the most rewarding hobbies for any person as it not only helps with the imagination but also enriches one’s vocabulary.We would love to encourage the habit but there are constraints,” said Singh.

A pioneer

Lamarr, who was the creative director of the CALM (creative arts, literary and music) Festival in Shillong, was a pioneer. Shabong recalls the first ever workshop that he, Lamarr and the Sahaki Society conducted at Don Bosco Youth Centre.
“This was a workshop of painting, photography, sculpture, writing etc,” he says.
“The Government saw our humble efforts to promote the arts. Lamarr and the Society approached the Government and we are grateful that we got help. It was in May 2012 that the CALM Festival first took place in Shillong. We were able to rope in professionals and experts. It was a grand affair from that year onwards,” he adds.
Shabong says he is contemplating whether to organise the fest this year.
While the festival, till last year, was a crowd-puller as Lamarr would have envisaged, Bookmark continues its journey and promises to keep the lamp burning.