A true landmark

"I’m very proud that South Bombay has a decent store of this size,” said Noel Tata, managing director of Trent Limited, the owners of the new Landmark book shop at the High Street Phoenix shopping complex in Lower Parel on May 3, 2010 addressing a gathering of the media, celebrities and guests. Covering 42,000 square feet with bookshelves stacked with 120,000 titles, music CDs and video DVDs, stationery items and toys the shop is located at the lower level of the Palladium shopping complex at the mall. What’s more Sir Jeffrey Archer released his latest collection of short stories, And Thereby Hangs A Tale at the shop’s preview.

"We chose this part of the city because its residents and the working population here are heavily into books and music,” Himanshu Chakrawarti, chief operating officer of the shop told Hindustan Times Cafe (May 3). "Our store will give them that one-stop access.” Close to 35 to 40 percent of the shop floor space is devoted to books, Chakrawarti told The Economic Times (ET) of May 4.

"Landmark’s second (Bombay) store is also notable for the attention that’s been paid to design,” noted ET. "This extends from the store being far more easily navigable to areas like the graphic novel section. Instead of being stacked in heaps on shelves, they are displayed on a series of stands, with entire racks reserved for popular superheroes like Batman. There are many more areas to sit and read unobtrusively, factored in after a lot of consumer feedback on the first store in Bombay where there’s a perennial struggle to get space on the single couch.”

Clockwise from top left: Section of the audience including Simone Tata and J. J. Irani (fourth and fifth from left); Noel Tata and Jeffrey Archer; items on display

There are currently 14 Landmark stores in India and around 15 shops in hotels and airports.

"I am not too fond of books, really,” Tata told DNA correspondent Soumyadipta Banerjee, adding, "I mean story books or novels or thrillers though I have read quite a few novels. When I do read, I read management stuff and books on business maybe. I am not really into (pleasure) reading. I like the serious stuff.”

Archer’s exuberant personality mollified the audience which had been waiting for more than an hour for him to arrive. Although there was no apology forthcoming for his late arrival (the motormen at the Central and Western railways had gone on a flash strike resulting in stupendous traffic jams all over Bombay), he had the audience eating out of his hand with the few opening remarks. He immediately took charge of the proceedings and hustled people who were sitting in the rear rows or standing in the aisles into the empty seats which were reserved for distinguished guests. "I believe in real people, not posh people,” said the former member of the British parliament. He congratulated Fabian Stubbs, the manager of the new store, who had successfully turned an underperforming Landmark outlet round the corner and made it profitable.

"India gets its first in the whole world,” Archer emphasized. The first launch of the book was in India, two weeks before it was released in the UK and four weeks before it was released in USA. The volume contains 15 stories from all over the world, nine of which are real stories narrated to him in the course of his voyages. His best story, which he heard three years ago, is "Caste off” which is set in Bombay and which occupies the pride of place of being the last story of the collection.

When asked about his writing Archer mentioned that he wrote all his novels and short stories in long hand with a felt tip pen and broke up his working day into four periods of two hours each from 6 a.m. to 8 a.m., from 10 a.m. to 12 noon, from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. and from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m.. His manuscript is then handed over to a secretary who types everything in triple spacing which he corrects with a pencil. He is presently working on the Clifton Chronicles which is a series of five novels each covering two decades from 1920 to 2020. The central character is Henry Clifton who is from Bristol and who is the son of a docker. Henry finds himself in a boarding school dormitory next to the son of the owner of the mines. The first novel has already gone through several drafts; he has written 400 pages and hopes to complete the novel in a year’s time.

"Storytelling is a gift,” he explained. A person maybe a good writer "but storytelling is something different… A storyteller makes you turn the page.” So many novels fail because the authors are good writers but bad storytellers, he explained. Rudyard Kipling mentioned that for every thousand writers there is one good storyteller. And among the best of the storytellers are R. K. Narayan, Charles Dickens and Alexander Dumas, said Archer. Among the current Indian writers, he likes Vikram Seth who, he says, is both a great writer as well as a good storyteller. The short story writers he particularly admires are F. Scott Fitzgerald, H. H. Munro (Saki), O’Henry and Guy de Maupasssant.