Word Wise

RN Bhattacharya whips out a slim,half-foot long book,painstakingly wrapped in a red cover. The print,you can make out from touch,is coarser than normal print and are a little raised from the page. The book in question is the first book in Bengali printed in London,in a woodblock printing press in 1811. “The price of the book in the current market is about Rs 12,000. It is called Maharaja Krishnachandra Rayasya Charitam: The Life of Raja Krishnachandra Raya,written by one Rajivlochan Mukhopadhyay. I got it while skimming through old books on College Street,” says Bhattacharya who runs a shop that sells antique books from his home at Sodepur. “I have been into this business for the past forty years,” he says,adding that he realised that stall owners at College Street often don’t realise the treasure they are sitting on. “They don’t understand the significance of the books and they sell them away for a pittance. I got twenty books,including this one,for just Rs 1,000,” he explains.

Apart from that he sources books from old Bengali aristocracy,royal families and people with zamindari roots who seem disinterested in keeping them.

Bhattacharya has a copy of the first print of the Gitanjali dating back to 1910,a compilation called Letters,Despatches and other State Papers from the Bombay Secretariat (1887). “The latter costs about Rs 14,000. It’s a valuable document of how the British conducted state affairs. I also have copies of Mohonbhog,a very interesting children’s magazine from early 1900s. It gives you an idea of how children’s literature evolved in our language,” says Bhattacharya.