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En Route To The Billionaire Club

'I keep margins really low'

T N Shanbhag, 77, proprietor of Strand Book Stall, believes in making good books available at a low cost

BS Research Bureau

I was born in a village in south Karnataka in 1925. My father was a rich landlord, who died when I was two-and-a-half years old. My mother was from a poor family who could barely read Kannada. An uncle who was staying with us as a dependent managed to grab all our property, including my mother's jewellery, and even refused to have me educated.

I sat for the poor boy's fund examination, came first and studied with the help of the scholarship. I was a voracious reader - by the time I was 16, there were hardly any unread books left in the library. I saved around Rs 28 and placed an order for the complete works of Swami Vivekananda. It cost me Rs 27. The book influenced me deeply, it was my introduction to idealism and is a guide till today.

Turning point

After completing my matriculation, I came to Mumbai and never went back. I joined St. Xavier's College and took up a part-time job. In those days, I would walk all the way to Tardeo from college to save the Rs 5 monthly tram fare, and buy books instead.

Call it fate or chance, I used to visit a big bookstall in Bombay where one day the salesman stopped me. He rudely asked me what I wanted. When I said I wanted to browse through Penguin's cheap editions, he gave a disdainful look, scratched his head, then said: 'No.' I was shocked. What was wrong in buying a cheap edition, if that was all I could buy?

Starting out

That day I decided I was going to be a bookseller after graduation. Sitting under my bodhi tree in the Prince of Wales Museum lawns, I decided to let everyone browse unhindered.

For two years, I skipped meals, walked instead of taking trams. At the end of it, I had saved around Rs 450, my capital. Now I needed a kiosk to sell my books. It was the late 1940s, Mumbai had just 12.5 lakh inhabitants, and stretched between Colaba and Boribunder. To sell English books, I had to be within this area.

I found my ideal place on a visit to Strand Cinema, one of the six theatres that screened English films. One day I wandered out of the auditorium during the interval and discovered a vacant corner on the premises. I rushed to the manager who asked me to speak to the owner, K K Modi, a self-made man with 50 theatres across the country.

The next day, I was knocking on Modi's office door. He thought it was a joke, selling books at a cinema. How much rent could I pay, he asked. He almost fell out of his chair when I said I had only Rs 450. He laughed and asked for a design for the kiosk. He understood I was in earnest and said he would build it for me. The rent would be fixed after seeing my accounts at the end of six months.

Make or break

On November 20, 1948, I was standing before my kiosk at Strand, without knowing what lay ahead. People started coming in and I would give a small talk about the books. Even then I offered a small discount.

Prominent people like Sir Ambalal Sarabhai, the then Bank of India chairman, and the retired diwan of Mysore, Mirza Ismail, were the first few customers. The first three years were a struggle with a mere Rs 1,200 monthly sales. In the third year, sales rose 10-fold and the business became viable. Around this time, I also got married.

In 1953, VH Gumaste, chief government pleader in the High Court, told me he had a place in Fort. He could give it without pagdi (deposit), but needed an assurance from someone in the High Court. I asked him if Chief Justice M C Chagla would do. Chagla was a frequent shopper and readily gave the assurance.

That was how I moved to the present outlet in November 1953. I retained the name Strand Book Stall and made steady progress. It could have been faster had I kept a bigger margin, but I always chose to give discounts. Around 1960, I made my first million. My prized customers included T T Krishnamachari, Y B Chavan and Jawaharlal Nehru.

Rules to play by

Today I sell books worth crores of rupees every month. I still give discounts; for good books it is steep. I believe that knowledge like air should be free. Knowledge is Saraswati for me. Even today, I make it a point to sell good books at very competitive prices, keeping my margins really low.

I continue to live in the same old flat at Warden Road into which I moved in 1963.

Road to recovery

I have just started going to office after six months since I was recovering from my second bypass surgery. Though I have been asked to take it easy, I go to the store in the evenings. I feel happy today, that our business and especially the branch in Bangalore, is doing so well. Its success has encouraged me to expand to Hyderabad and Delhi.

However, being a practical man, I have modified my plans slightly. In the electronic age, I feel that the essence of Strand cannot be spread on a widescale. Instead, with an email data bank of more than 78,000 addresses, the store caters to orders on the net to a large extent. Today if I order 5,000 copies of a book, orders for at least 2,000 are through the Internet. This way I meet my target audience directly through the net.

I think it must be some kind of world record that I have managed to earn revenues of Rs 26 crore from the Mumbai store itself as on March 31 this year, from a 400 sq ft store and a 300 sq ft loft. I continue to pay my staff three times the market salary and give them four-and-a-half months of salary as bonus every year.

I am also planning to take the Strand Book Festival, started in Mumbai three years ago, to places like Aurangabad and Pune and to Mumbai suburbs. This year, the festival was a huge success and saw more than five lakh visitors. In 17 days it made more than Rs 2 crore. The exhibitions have really been an eye opener for me, since I never expected so many people to turn up and take advantage of discounts on good books like this before.

Today, I am very rich in friends and loyal customers. I treat every reader - I don't like the word customer - with respect. I have an ideal and I am just trying to approximate it.

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