Bookstores in Chandigarh

An essay in The Tribune names The English Book Shop and Capital Book Depot among the three stalwart bookshops of a reader's life in Chandigarh in the years before 1991. The English Book Shop, near the Neelam cinema block, has been open since 1952: a broad general stock of fiction, non-fiction, children's books and academic titles, with a good stationery counter. Capital Book Depot is the bigger one, with shelves running past a hundred thousand titles across almost every subject and a small coffee corner inside. Both are on the same plaza, so one visit covers them.

The Browser on Madhya Marg in Sector 8-C is the quiet alternative. It is a bookshop and a lending library in one room, and it also publishes: it began as a bookseller in 1997 and has published books since 2018, from coffee-table volumes and illustrated children's titles to fiction and poetry. The shelves are hand-picked, strongest on fiction, children's books and large illustrated editions. Members come to borrow; anyone can come in to browse.

The two halves of the city's book trade are easy to split. Sector 17 is the centre, reachable on foot from the hotels of Sectors 17 and 22; give Capital Book Depot an hour if you want India-themed reading before the next leg of a trip, and finish with filter coffee at the Indian Coffee House on the same plaza. The Browser in Sector 8 sits on the cafe strip of Sectors 7 to 10, so it pairs naturally with a late breakfast at Beige Cafe or Backpackers Cafe. Between the two sectors, take a cab or an auto. More: breakfast places and getting around.