Shortly before TS Shanbhag shuttered his Premier Bookshop in 2009, Asha Ghosh and Kathleen Dargis made a short film about him. The film wa...
Shortly before TS Shanbhag shuttered his Premier Bookshop in 2009, Asha Ghosh and Kathleen Dargis made a short film about him. The film was dedicated to the photographer Raghav Shreyas, who died tragically young, and was a habitué of the store.
It features, among other things, a lovely cameo of the owner of Premier Bookshop meeting the owner of Koshy’s Parade Café, which lay just a hundred yards away, and where Shanbhag often had a coffee before opening his store. But perhaps the nicest moment in the film comes early on.
A mother with a teenager alongside her speaks of bringing her son to the store when he was little, en route to her monthly visit to the British Library, then situated just above Koshy’s. As they entered Premier the boy asked the mother whether this was the library. When she answered in the negative, he said, but it contains all the books in the world.
Warm and generous
I first visited Premier in 1979, when I was in my twenties. For the next three decades the store and its owner were an indispensable part of my life. My younger friends in Bangalore came to Premier as little children. The activist Achal Prabala’s first memories of...
