Rare India

Anand Sankar chances upon a rare books store right in the middle of the national capital that stocks tomes going back three centuries.

Off the bustling South Extension shopping area in New Delhi, a nondescript residence is home to a treasure trove of rare literature on the Indian subcontinent going back three centuries. Southex Books and Prints, rare book dealers, is as discreet as it gets.

Ushering me into the wood-panelled room that houses some of his wares, Rajiv Jain lets me into a world that we will not see other than through these books. Rajiv, his brother Sanjiv, and of late his daughter Rashi, run the company which was started in 1984. “In India, there are very few sellers of rare books. There might not be more than six booksellers of international class in India, while in the United Kingdom you will find thousands. That is how big the market is,” offers Jain.

 

There are so many titles here stacked neatly into shelves that go right upto the ceiling that, I realise, jotting down names of titles is futile. The topics range from social customs of Indian tribes to wildlife, and early accounts of Indian art. Interspersed in between the pages are magnificent lithographs, which afford a glimpse into an era gone by. “Rare books are a major component of the art world. About five per cent of the international turnover in art comes from rare books. This is second only to paintings which accounts for 60 per cent, according to data from leading international auction houses Sotheby’s and Christie’s,” he says.

Southex Books and Prints deals mostly in books that cover the expanse of the Indian subcontinent — “greater India” encompassing Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Nepal, Tibet, Bhutan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, the Indian Ocean area and parts of South-east Asia.

The highlight of the Jains’ collection are plate books printed between 1760 and 1880, a period often referred to as the “golden period” of books on India. Jain says his firm holds almost 80 per cent of the printed material from this period. “India greatly fascinated Europeans in the 17th and 18th centuries. Since there was no photography in those years, people wrote and painted to tell the people back in England and Europe about the Orient. Name anything and it has been documented. At the same time, the industrial revolution was underway, so paintings could be replicated, albeit in limited numbers. These prints are a part of the illustrated history of India, with the writing making it even more interesting,” he says.

Other books of interest are signed first edition copies from the pre-independence era to the 1960s, especially books on the art of the times. There are standalone lithographs and the Jains have been scouring the world for the earliest hand-drawn nautical maps of the Indian region, all of which, Jain informs, have a ready market among his clientèle comprising collectors, government libraries and foreign libraries building an India collection.

As for prices, they range “from a few thousand to a few lakhs”, is all Jain will let on. He gets the odd buyer who’ll want a copy or two, but what Jain really prefers is putting together a collection and then offering it to a buyer. And though there are no independent valuers of rare books, pricing follows a simple principle. The overriding determining factor is, of course, “condition of the book”, but if there are many copies of a book in the market, then the mark up for any one will depend on the price at which the last one sold.

Southex Books and Prints is a member of the UK-based Provincial Booksellers Fairs Association (PBFA), an organisation of antiquarian and second-hand book sellers which sets the guidelines for the way the rare book business is to be transacted. It’s the PBFA which has come up with a way to grade books — mint, fine, very good, good, reading copy and poor — in order to gauge their value (warning at the same time that other than mint, all other grades are subjective).

To ensure the rare books get the best possible value, the Jains have their own book restoration service under which they undertake de-acidification of the paper, cure brittleness, reback books, clean stains and fungus, and restore the binding.

Rare books are delicate things, and need to be kept in fairly controlled conditions for them to last — an air conditioned room where the humidity does not exceed 60 per cent and temperature stays below 32 degrees Celsius, Jain recommends.

At a time the economic downturn has shaken valuations of art worldwide, Jain says rare books are a conservative growth option for a collector. “There has been a steady increase in prices of Indian rare books. It has been at double the rate of the prevailing rate of inflation in the international market. The slowdown has triggered a fall, but not to the extent of other art objects. So with rare books you not just enjoy the product but you also have steady price appreciation.”