A treasure trove of classic novels
The moment you enter Ranga Shankara, you’ll find a door that leads to a bookstore known as Paperback. It was launched in June 2013 and since then, as one of its partners, Usman Merchant, says, it has been a “refuge to a thinking mind.”
“It has such an eclectic set of books. It feels like going into the library of a person with good taste,” says renowned theatre personality, Arundhati Nag.
As we entered Paperback, the first thing that we noticed was a rare collection of drawings by Leonardo Da Vinci. When we looked around, we found out that there was a wide range of niche books. The books were mostly by authors writing in English but there were rare books in other languages as well, especially Kannada. The bookstore does not keep bestsellers at all.
“The people watching theatre at Ranga Shankara are assumed to have a refined taste. So, we thought we should target things which are not easily accessible in other places. If we wanted to be different we had to create a space of our own,” says Usman.
The shelves are lined with books like On the Road by Jack Kerouac, Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote, Fear and Loathing in America by Hunter S Thompson, and many more. But that is not all. The store has a refined collection of graphic novels like The Traveler, the Tiger and the very clever Jackal, a story by Reshma Sapre and illustrated by Jessica Lian. DVDs of films by Akira Kurosawa, Majid Majidi, Ingmar Bergman, Wong Kar Wai and even Indian filmmakers like Mrinal Sen, Basu Chatterjee and Saeed Mirza can also been seen on the shelves. There are books on music such as The Heroin Diaries by Nikki Sixx, bBassist of Motley Crue and The Lost Beatles Photographs by Larry Marian.
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