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Select Book Shop
As in 2024
Arnav Chandrasekhar, January 9, 2024: The Indian Express
From Homer to Euripides, P G Wodehouse to William Dalrymple, the books are stacked high at Select Bookstore, nestled in a quiet lane just off Brigade Road. Some of the titles are familiar sights that you might see in any other bookstore. Others, on careful examination, reveal themselves to be volumes over a century old. Select has long been a family-run enterprise – 94-year-old KKS Murthy and his son K Sanjay still run the show here.
The story of Select begins in 1945 with the first-generation proprietor, advocate KBK Rao. Speaking to the Indian Express, K Sanjay says, “My grandfather, KBK Rao, was a lawyer practicing in Kurnool. At some point, he decided to quit that profession and open a bookshop from his personal collection. He got a shed in Museum Road from a foreigner who was residing in Bangalore and opened the shop there.” Soon after, Select moved to a fresh set of premises on M G Road, in an old Anglo-Indian property, he adds.
The store then moved in the late ’70s to the first floor of a building near the M G Road-Brigade Road junction. Meanwhile, KKS Murthy, who was earlier working for Hindustan Aeronautics Limited, resigned and started working at the bookstore with KBK Rao until the latter passed away. After having to vacate from there as well, Select finally found its permanent home off Brigade Road around 1984. K Sanjay himself has been working at Select since 1999, having previously been an accountant.
K Sanjay recalls, “I was told by my father and a few customers who are still coming here that C V Raman was a common visitor. Someone recently told me that when he was visiting the premises on M G Road, J Krishnamurti was there that day. A Maharaja had also visited in those days, possibly from Kolhapur or Baroda.”
A more familiar royal visitor to Select was Srikantadatta Wodeyar himself. Sanjay says, “He had visited and bought many books which my father had gathered for him… this was sometime in the 2000s.”
Another longtime customer is Ruskin Bond, who has been ordering books for around 30 years. Historian Ramachandra Guha has often found research materials for his books at Select. At a lecture in 2023, he also recalled having found his grandmother’s horoscope in the bookstore – possibly having made it there inside one of several books that were sold after his grandfather passed away.
Many rare books have passed in and out of Select’s doors. According to Sanjay, “In my grandfather’s days, there used to be auctions held in Bangalore where you could bid for some old books. Many Anglo-Indians in the cantonment area traded out their collections to our shop. So that’s how our collection got built up. There were also suppliers in Bombay, Delhi, and Chennai who would send us the book we needed, apart from locals.” One such book that stuck in Sanjay’s memory is an ancient Dutch book dating back to the late 1600s. Another is a copy of the Gitanjali, signed by Rabindranath Tagore himself.
Like the many bookstores of Brigade Road and Church Street, Select has survived the coming of the tech age. Sanjay says the only real change is that orders from other cities have stopped – but within Bengaluru itself, there are always readers who take the view that there is nothing quite like holding a book in your hands.
As the city moves ahead, certainties are few and far between. But one of those certainties is Select itself, with the scent of old books welcoming visitors for years on end.
