I finally find some books!

At the roundabout near Veer Narriman road there is an informal second hand book market. Thousands of English language books, scrounged from who-knows-where. Prices which, in Australia, you could only find in that sort of small op-shop where two old ducks like to put their heads together and debate whether a book is worth twenty or thirty cents. And there aren't many of those left.

I gazed on them in wonder. My god, the stuff! At the front were all the recent popular fiction, but buried in huge stacks at the back were some books I'd put down money for at any time. One dealer had the best part of an old naval library - books on compasses, ships navigation, naval history. Yum. Another had inherited a psychological library from somewhere - brilliant titles, obscure stuff like "Psychiatry and psychology in the USSR" and the like. Another had a big stack of Jane's militaria guides, which always sell for $40-$50.

And I looked on in wonderment. And went through it. And felt like crying.

None of them were good enough! Not good enough to cart back home, anyway. If I'd been in Sydney I could have pulled the car up, negotiated a bulk discount, spent the day going through it, then filled my car and gone away very pleased with myself. But as good as the books were, they weren't obvious WINNERS. There was nothing so clearly good that I would want to cart it home. It was just good quality stock, at very cheap prices. (I mean, take the naval stuff - no doubt there were $200 books in there. But I had no idea which. The only way would be to buy the lot and find the winners as you came across them.)

I went away. I thought of Daryl. He was shaking his head in sorrow. HE wouldn't have left a pile of books like that without finding something. I thought of his crazy dream, never realised, of saving up his US mail, buying himself a return ticket, loading his suitcases full of mail packages, and getting himself a free trip to Hawaii. I *had* to find something.

So I went back, and looked. And eventually found a very nice first edition Secret Seven, in dustjacket. It's only a fifty dollar book, but that's ok. It's cool, and I've never had a first edition Secret Seven or Famous Five with the dustjacket before.

Afterwards I went and had pizza, then ice-cream, overlooking the Arabian Sea at dusk. That was really nice too, and all-up was one of the best afternoons I've had on this trip.

Today, feeling succesful, I got a taxi and went around looking at antique shops and book shops for more treasures. The taxi guy was happy to stick with me for the entire morning, for about $10, but wanted to take me to super-fancy antique stores in the idea that I would buy stuff and he would get kickbacks, which left both of us frustrated. We worked it out, though - he would take me to places where he gets paid for bringing sucker tourists, I would spend ten minutes there, pretending to be interested in buying stuff, then we'd go somewhere I wanted to go. All cool - we were fine once we worked that out.

There's really only one decent old bookstore in Mumbai. Nothing too old, disapointingly - I think the books fall apart in the heat here. I got a couple of things that turned out to be junk, and a really nice, completely unavailable history of the Indian Signal Corps' dress and customs. That looks like it should be a hundred dollar book. One the way out I happened to glance at a spine, which read "Hound and Horn". That rung a bell from somewhere, so I got it down and glanced at the contents page. Yes! 1932 American literary journal, containing first publications of poems by T S Eliot an ee cummings, and a letter to the editor from Ernest Hemingway complaining sarcastically about something that had been written in the previous issue about him, Dos Passos, and Fitzgerald. Nice! Lacks the original wraps, but whatever - at AUD $1.20, I'm always happy to buy a journal containing first publications by three of the giants of twentieth century literature.

So pleased am I with myself that I think I'm now going to go buy this $200 hand-cranked grammophone, which is almost certainly a piece of shit pieced together from a variety of parts that will stop operating in a week. But I love it anyway.