Dotted with bookstores, Bengaluru has no shortage of avid readers. But when it comes to collecting old and rare books—those with unique plate illustrations and more than a century old—such bibliophiles are few. Bengaluru-based author and book collector Pradeep Sebastian is one such exception.

Uniquely, all his books are what he calls “books about books”—dedicated either to the love of reading or the journey of finding rare and old volumes. While The Book Beautiful (2023) is a memoir of his journey as a book collector and how it began, The Book Hunters of Katpadi (2017) is something Sebastian describes as India’s first “bibliomystery”. Like many works of fiction, it is a mystery, but one rooted in the world of rare books and book collecting.

Recalling where his love of books came from, Sebastian says, “I have been a bibliophile since childhood. I used to scour private circulating libraries—there were many in the 1980s. Since then, spending time in Bengaluru bookshops is something I have been doing a lot…interacting with the owners and the people who come there.”

However, the rare book bug bit him elsewhere. It was while he was living in America that he came across book fairs and shops dedicated to antiquarian books and met fellow collectors. “In India, we don’t really have a culture of rare book collecting and dealing. When you go to our bookshops, they don’t have something like a rare book section. Second-hand bookstores like Select (on Brigade Road) had some antiquarian and rare material which scholars accessed—but not a full-fledged antiquarian bookshop,” he says.

Recently, Sebastian, collector V R Ferose, and others established the ‘Antiquarian Bookworm’, a space dedicated to rare and historically significant books, along with Krishna Gowda, proprietor of the Bookworm Bookstore (which also houses the Antiquarian Bookworm).

Sebastian has also founded a society in Bengaluru devoted to collecting rare books—the Book Hunters of Bengaluru. “It is less than a year old and people are already showing interest in it. We are hoping that it will get people interested in collecting,” he adds.

From bookstores to online forums

On the process of actually finding these rare books, Sebastian says that one may spot the occasional lucky find in the corner of a bookstore. (This journalist, for instance, once found a 130-year-old volume of Roman history in a Bengaluru bookstore).

But more often than not, today, the online medium is where one finds collectibles—on platforms such as AbeBooks and viaLibri, he says. “It could be a book dealer somewhere in Japan, South America, or Australia,” Sebastian explains. “They are all there, and you have access to their inventory and can speak to them.”

As far as expenses go, Sebastian says one can start at a reasonable price by collecting books that may be old and rare, but not highly sought after. As one moves into rarer titles and special editions, however, the prices rise.

On his latest endeavours with The Book Hunters of Katpadi, Sebastian said, “If you are a book collector or very attached to the world of books, the best kind of mystery you can read is a bibliomystery. There has never been one in India…though there have been very fine mysteries. I wanted a book that is very intensely bibliophilic, and so in a very uncompromising way, I made it a hard-core bibliomystery.”

He adds frankly, “There were some mixed reviews. People found that there was too much that slowed down the narrative through bibliographic details. I wrote the kind of book that I would like to read, and I know several people who enjoyed the very things that others found frustrating.”

Sebastian is currently co-editing an anthology for Hachette India that deals with bibliophile writing.