Wheelers and dealers

Oct 06, 2012 - Age Correspondent

If you’ve walked into an Indian railway station, then chances are, you’ve also come across a Wheeler bookstore. These ubiquitous stalls stock everything from the day’s newspapers to the latest magazines, railway guides to popular paperbacks.

While it may sound like a fancy British brand, the A.H. Wheeler bookstores, are in fact, Indian, set up in 1887 by a businessman, T.K. Banerjee and French writer Emile Moreau.
The Wheeler bookstores borrowed the name of the successful chain of bookstores in the West (Arthur Henry Wheelers) and among the first books they sold were a collection of stories by Rudyard Kipling, under the title Indian Railway Library Series for a rupee.
The Wheeler bookstores long enjoyed a monopoly on selling books at railway stations, but in the years to come, it would lose that privilege. They still remain a part of the landscape at many stations.

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