Blossoms Book House in Bengaluru brings a classic touch to your reading list

Blossoms Book House in Bengaluru brings a classic touch to your reading list

The term ‘classic’ literature conjures up images of sepia-tinted pages, long-drawn out plot lines and a teacher droning away on a midsummer’s day. But whether it is Dickens or Dostoevsky, Salinger or Shakespeare, there is a reason classics never go out of style — they are enduring pieces of art that have withstood the passage of time.

It is this timelessness that has seen the Blossom Book House, one of the more popular second hand bookstores in the city open a third store on Church Street — a stretch with perhaps the most number of bookshops per square feet in the city.

What sets this location apart is that it has an exclusive section for Penguin Classics, says Mayi Gowda, founder and owner of Blossoms.

The venue is part of the Penguin Classics festival, an initiative to not only re-introduce classics to the reading public, but also acquaint them with authors they may have not explored before.

“While this has been an annual event for the past five years or so, this is the first time it has been extended for three months, instead of the usual one,” says Mayi. Unlike the usual USP of the store all the titles in this series are new and not pre-owned, he adds.

With as many as 2,000 different titles available at this venue, there are bound to be authors such as Yukio Mishima, Georges Simenon, Ismail Kadare, Mikhail Bulgakov and others from different countries, eras and genres, waiting to be discovered.

According to Manoj Satti, Group Vice President - International Product & Marketing, Penguin Random House India, the aim of this initiative was to showcase the wide range of classic literature and not just the well-known ones. “Instead of allocating just one bookshelf of a store to classics, we thought a place such as this would have more of an impact. Hopefully, these other titles will pique the interest of readers who walk in. ”