BOOKSHOP FEATURE: Inside an Indian Indie Bookstore, by Venkatesh Swamy

 

"Just like its customers, a bookstore has its own personality and temperament ..."

Eureka! bookstore in New Delhi, the first specialist, independent, children's bookstore in India, was set up in April 2003 by Venkatesh Swamy and Swati Roy, two passionate book-lovers who felt that they should do something to get children and books together under one roof.

Eureka! believes in selecting and promoting good books for children. As an extension, Venky and Swati also co-founded and set up India's first children's literature festival Bookaroo that has travelled to 17 cities with 49 editions - they will celebrate their 50th festival in Shillong later this month. Here Venky writes about their experiences.

If one were asked to define a brick-and-mortar independent bookstore’s day in one word, that word would be unpredictable. But it is the unpredictability that is exciting in a world that is increasingly click-and-go. Our world’s adage is festina lente, a slowness that is at once charming and frustrating.

Twenty two years ago, when Swati and I set up Eureka!, the concept of a neighbourhood bookstore was unheard of in Delhi. Even rarer was one that sold only children’s books. As we muddled through, we read more books than we sold (later, we would sell more books than we read before the cycle started all over again), made friends, started in-store events and book clubs and also managed to launch Bookaroo, India’s first children’s literature festival (incidentally, it won the Festival of the Year prize at the London Book Fair’s International Excellence Awards in 2017).

It has been eventful and memorable. From relocating three times, to watching the rise of online selling, to closing down during Covid then opening up again, to influencers, we have seen it all. We have witnessed change - in readers’ tastes in books as well as an explosion of genres, authors, illustrators and design. A children’s book market that was dependent on imported books now has compelling writing in Indian languages and in English by Indian authors, Indian publishers exploring unexplored genres and stunning picture books. The shelves are full of interesting books. What is more interesting, however, is what happens inside the bookstore.

Sometimes, nothing happens. The doors open at 11 am and often the only people in the store are the staff till about 2pm, when you spot a customer - approaching very slowly – either alone or with a child. Instinctively, you want to drag her in by the arm but you don’t. The in-house joke is to observe a minute’s silence as the doors open and they walk in.

Then there are moments when the store is packed and you wonder why the customers cannot space out their visits. For many of our visitors, being at Eureka! is not just about buying a book and rushing away. We chat, we exchange news, we receive gifts, share heartbreaks and fears, discover common friends from the past and answer questions ranging from the future of reading, to 'how to get my child interested in books’, to why we don’t have an in-store coffee counter.

There is one question that makes us nervous and excited. Young man or young lady marches in confidently and asks: 'Remember me?'  Both of us know that they are from our past and have come back to visit the store after all those years. The saving grace is that Swati hardly ever forgets faces and names. So we sail through it and the walk down memory lane gives us a high that lasts for days. Another one that makes us smile wryly to ourselves is: 'You are still working here?' And there is the usual question that starts with, “You know, on Amazon …”

Being a children’s bookstore does not mean we haven’t thought about the parents who bring them in. The store has a couple of shelves dedicated just for them while their children browse away. The children are lovely as they haven’t developed ‘traits’ - yet. But the grown-ups are different.

There is the delightful customer and the irascible customer, there is the chatty customer and the Instagram-driven one, there is the ‘secret scanner’ (scans ISBNs to compare prices on online portals), the active discount-seeker and the customer who believes that he ought to endorse the store – and does it. Then there is the overachiever parent who wants their child to read a couple of levels ‘higher’ than his age.

A recent phenomenon that has us worried is the way children are being egged on to become published writers far too soon. It is not that they lack the talent, but we strongly believe that childhood should be a time for reading, not looking for publishers.

Just like its customers, a bookstore has its own personality and temperament. Eureka’s tends towards agreeable-ness while its temperament is more on the phlegmatic side. It may all sound unbusinesslike, but as bookstore people we wouldn’t want to do anything else. Business can continue to be unpredictable but, like the cobbler, we will stick to our last.

Swati Roy has been awarded the 2025 Snehlata Prize for Promoting a Lifelong Love for Reading in Children

Photographs: a visiting customer reads to her child; Petr Horacek, visiting writer and illustrator; storyteller Vatsala Zutshi; dog Nanu who visits every day; Venky and Swati

Guest review by Pippa Goodhart: FIERCE BAD RABBITS by Clare Pollard

  

"Just about anyone will meet old book friends in this book, and find things out about those old friends they never knew before. A treat!"

Pippa Goodhart has written over a hundred and fifty books for children. Best known is her picture book You Choose, illustrated by Nick Sharratt. Her most recent children’s novel, The Great Sea Dragon Discovery, set in her home village of Grantchester, won the Young Quills Award for best historical children’s novel for 10-13 year olds. More on Pippa's website. 

This book is a fascinating, heart-stretching, humanity-sharing, amusing read for anybody interested in children or books. Or, come to think of it, anybody who has ever been a child. It’s about picture books, but, more than that, it’s about story and about what makes us who we are.

Clare Pollard is a poet who became a mother. Sharing books with her two young children and remembering her own childhood experiences of story, she adds academic study and a perceptive mind to considering the books many of us know and love. She writes so lucidly, with humour, moving fast through her rich material, carrying the reader onwards.

We get something of a cultural history of the twentieth and early twenty-first century, reflected in what we present to children. It’s gob-smacking to learn that both Franco and Hitler were scared enough of the potential influence of The Story of Ferdinand that they banned and burned it. What was the scary power of that little story for children written by Munro Leaf and illustrated by Robert Lawson? Simply that Ferdinand, the bull, is a character who would rather sit and sniff the flowers than fight. The book was published in 1936. In the US it became a best-seller, knocking Gone With The Wind off the top of the sales chart.

We learn of Eric Carle digging trenches for Nazis aged only fifteen, really understanding what extreme hunger is like, before idly playing with the hole punch on his desk and coming up with his classic Hungry Caterpillar. So many classic children’s picture books have links to the Second World War. Eric Hill, ex-RAF, realised that he’d given Spot the dog aircraft markings with the placement of spots on his coat! There are many more stories behind the stories to discover when you read this book.

I loved getting something of the personalities and lives of children’s book creators. The enterprise of Beatrix Potter, not just self-publishing when publishers turned down her Peter Rabbit story, but also creating and selling merchandise based on her artwork. We hear that Alison Uttley, creator of saintly Little Grey Rabbit, was herself of a bitchy tendency, calling Little Grey Rabbit’s illustrator, Margaret Tempest, ‘a humourless bore’, and neighbour Enid Blyton, ‘a vulgar, curled woman'. In contrast, we have charming Jan Pienkowski regularly meeting-up with Helen Nicoll, the author of his Meg and Mog books, at Membury Service Station, always taking with him a small bunch of flowers for the table they sat at to discuss the next book!

But there are sadder things. It’s so poignant to learn that the Babar stories which open with Babar weeping over his dead mother, was written and illustrated by young father, Jean de Brunhoff, when he knew himself to have TB, and that his own children would soon face the death of a beloved parent. Other examples of stories behind stories had me in actual tears.

And there’s just the quirky interest to be found. Did you know that Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) had a stammer, so referred to himself as ‘the dodo’ as in Do-Do-Dodgson? Hence the dodo in Alice in Wonderland? Do you know what name Winnie the Pooh really had, if only AA Milne had listened more carefully to his son? Did you know that John Ruskin urged Kate Greenaway to undress the ‘girlies’ in her pictures? Urgh! I leave you to read and discover these things out for yourselves.

We also touch on picture book history through the development of different printing techniques, the start of children’s sections in libraries, the introduction of novelty elements of flaps and shaped pages, and more.

As Clare Pollard says, picture book stories are perhaps an area of culture shared more generally than almost any other. And they are important. Picture books, she says, ‘are teaching our children how they should be’. We know that the ones which strike a chord with children are loved and remembered for a lifetime.

I re-read this book over a couple of days, relishing reminders of favourite books and favourite book creators, some of whom I’ve been lucky enough to meet in my Heffers Children’s Bookshop days in the early ‘80s up to now being a picture book writer myself. Just about anyone will meet old book friends in this book, and find things out about those old friends they never knew before. A treat!

Fierce Bad Rabbits is published by Penguin.

SPECIAL FEATURE: Q & A with Susan Elkin on her reading retrospective, ALL BOOKED UP

 

"I have done a huge amount of journalism and, contrary to what the cynical public thinks, that means that I'm used to researching and then writing the truth."

Susan Elkin taught English in secondary schools for 36 years, latterly developing a parallel career as a writer. Since 1990 she has written over 5000 articles for newspapers and magazines, English text books, how-to books for teachers, a book about careers in theatre and latterly three volumes of memoir: Please Miss We’re Boys (2019), The Alzheimer’s Diaries (2022) and All Booked Up (2024); she has her own weekly blog, Susan's Bookshelves, where she reviews music and drama as well as books. She lives in South London.

Writers Review: You've written widely about inspiring a love of reading in children. What are the best ways to encourage a love of reading? What is the situation now in schools and how would you like to see it change?

Susan Elkin: Enthusiasm is key. It's vital to communicate a love of books. So share books, talk about books and - vitally - whether you're a teacher or a parent, for goodness sake let children see you reading for pleasure. If you don't, they get the message that reading is a childish thing which you stop doing when you're grown up. I have never forgiven Tony Blair, early in his premiership, for visiting a primary school and, when the children asked him what his favourite book was telling them that he was too busy to read.

In schools. teachers are very good at teaching phonics and so on as they are now required to do. Decoding the squiggles. though, is the easy bit. It's developing and encouraging reading after that which is the challenge and it's where many schools fall down, not least because there are so many banal, dull hoops the curriculum requires them to jump through in terms of, for example, very formulaic comprehension exercises. I think every class at every level should have a block of independent reading time every day - in silence, read anything you like and the teacher reads too. We used to call this USSR (Uninterrupted, sustained silent reading) or ERIC (Everyone reads in class) and I think it should be a key part of the curriculum ... but I'm not holding my breath.

WR: What are your thoughts on the prevalence of celebrities now writing children’s books?

Susan: Well, I suppose it depends who they are and how good they are. David Walliams is, in my view, outstanding. His books are very funny and he has developed a real love of reading in many children - just as Roald Dahl and JK Rowling did. Richard Coles's crime novels are quite fun and well enough written. And of course there are others.

On the other hand an awful lot of it is the literary equivalent of junk food and often turned out by ghost writers with publishers simply grabbing names that will sell books. And often, I suspect, this is instead of excellent writers whose names are not (yet) well known. On the day I'm writing this, it has just been announced that Jeremy Vine has secured a two book deal. Well, he's not a bad radio presenter but that doesn't mean he can write decent fiction. But I'll reserve judgement until I've seen what he (or his ghost writer) produces.

WR: You've had wide experience of reviewing books for young people, eg. for The School Librarian. Were you ever tempted to write children’s fiction yourself?

Susan:  No. I have no talent for fiction although I'm very much a fiction junkie and read vast quantities of it . It's a strange thing. I have done a huge amount of journalism and, contrary to what the cynical public thinks, that means that I'm used to researching and then writing the truth. I'm so conditioned to this that I find it impossible to make things up! It's probably why I can do memoir, though, because I'm describing what actually happened - at least as I remember or percieve it.

WR: I'm impressed by the range of your publications, the hard work that went into establishing yourself and how well it paid off in terms of opportunities coming your way. How would you advise other writers to get into freelance journalism?

Susan: Probably through a good degree in whatever interests you (English, history, politics, maths etc) and then looking for some kind of work experience placement. Very few successful journalists did “media studies” or anything similar so don’t bother with that. Write as much as you can wherever you are – community newsletters, student magazines and so on so that you build experience and a portfolio. My own experience is not typical – I gradually moved into journalism from teaching from about 1990 at a time when all the broadsheet newspapers had a whole page devoted to education every week. I started by sending on-spec opinion pieces to editors. Sadly, that would never work now.

WR: Writing The Alzheimer's Diaries must have felt very different from your other writing. Did you begin writing it for yourself rather than for publication?

Susan:  Not really, although – with hindsight – it probably helped me to deal with, and process, a pretty grim situation. I am programmed to write about almost everything which happens to me so when my husband, Nick, was first diagnosed it seemed the obvious thing to do – once he’d given me his approval, of course. At first I thought I’d do it as a newspaper column but none of my contacts wanted it. I did eventually get a version of the opening blog into Daily Telegraph, though. I wrote it as a weekly blog as we went along over the 28 months between Nick’s diagnosis and death in 2019. By then it was a pretty substantial block of work – and writer that I am – I couldn’t bear the idea of not taking it further. The book came out in 2022. It’s not gloomy – just truthful and, many people have told me, often funny. I regard it as a sort of memorial to Nick and I think he’d be pretty pleased with it.

WR: You’ve written a lot about music and drama and the lack of opportunities for young people. What would you like a new Minister for Culture to do?

Susan:  Fund music education for every child so that there is an entitlement to learn a musical instrument or sing in a choir. At the same time wouldn’t it be great if they learned to read music at the same time as they learned to read words? Of course they aren’t all going to take to it but I’d like every single child to have the chance. Drama is easier because it’s cheaper – train teachers both in initial training and CPD to build drama and drama games into their teaching. And what about grants for school productions to encourage schools to stage them? Perhaps, more radically, the minister could liaise with the new Secretary of State for Education and look for ways of changing the culture in schools so that head teachers are less focused on “results” and better able to see how holistic education benefits every child and raises standards. Abolishing SATS (standard attainment tests) would be a good start.

WR: What will you write next?

Susan: Well in addition to all the routine work – reviewing shows and concerts, writing arts features for magazines and my weekly Susan’s Bookshelves blog - I’ve just started work on a new book. Memoir style again, this time it’s about writing. I’ve met some extraordinary people and been in some pretty unlikely situations during the last 30 years (visiting a primary school in Orkney, interviewing June Whitfield, writing about hedge trimming, attending vespers at Ampleforth, crying with a mother in a children’s hospice and an awful lot more) and I think there’s a story to tell. At present I’m going though old diaries and files and making a lot of preparatory notes.

WR: Thanks, Susan - hope you enjoy this preparatory stage and we'll look forward to seeing what it leads to!

All Booked Up is published by The Book Guild.

See also Susan's review of Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go.

THE LIBRARIAN by Salley Vickers, reviewed by Adèle Geras

"Holding it gives real physical pleasure. Since one of the main themes of the novel is the delight that comes from stories, it’s fitting that this should be so..."

Adèle Geras lives in Cambridge and reads a lot. She’s published six novels for adults, the latest of which is Love or Nearest Offer, published in paperback by Quercus. She has also published many books for children and young adults.

Perhaps the first thing to say about this book is that Salley Vickers has been very well served by her publishers. It’s a most beautiful object: bound in eau- de-nil cloth, and with pretty, flower-strewn endpapers. Holding it gives the reader real physical pleasure. Since one of the main themes of the novel is the delight that comes from stories, it’s fitting that this should be so.

Sylvia is a young librarian who moves into a cottage in East Mole and takes up a post as Children’s Librarian. She rents a cottage from Mrs Bird, and from that moment her life is linked with that of the Bird family, and with those of her neighbours in the village. She’s involved with the children, in particular clever Sam and shy, awkward Lizzie. She meets and falls in love with the local doctor, who is married and who has a somewhat wayward daughter called Marigold.

We learn a great deal about the workings of the library, and of how Sylvia draws the local children into reading her own childhood favourites. Not everyone has enlightened ideas, however, and when a copy of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer goes missing from the Restricted Access shelves, a whole series of events unfolds, at the end of which things in East Mole have changed forever.

I won’t say more about what happens, for fear of spoilers, but I would recommend this book to anyone who enjoys a tale of ordinary life, told plainly but evocatively. I’d also give it to anyone interested in children’s books, or anyone who believes that the books we read in childhood have the capacity to shape our lives forever. It’s dedicated to Jacqueline Wilson, (who’s been a very good friend of mine for something like 40 years) and Philip Pullman, whom I first met in the early 1990s, so I felt a personal pull to it even before I began reading.

The personal connections continue. One of the friends I’ve made since moving to Cambridge in 2010 is Sally Christie, who is the daughter of Philippa Pearce, who wrote Tom’s Midnight Garden. This astonishing novel, first published in 1958, figures large in The Librarian and is one of Vickers’s own favourites. I am very happy when lines of life and literature converge in this satisfying way.

The Librarian is published by Viking.