Bookstores in Hyderabad

On Sunday mornings the pavements of Abids, between Chermas and the GPO, disappear under books. Hundreds of sellers lay them straight on the ground: paperbacks, out-of-print classics, stacks of old National Geographics, now and then a Persian volume that has drifted in from the Old City. Prices start at about ₹10. The market has run for more than forty years, and it works on patient rummaging: come before noon, because the good finds leave early, and haggle gently rather than hard. It is Sundays only; on other days Abids is an ordinary shopping street. More on the Abids Sunday Book Market.

The shop that keeps Abids readable for the rest of the week. For more than twenty-five years it has dealt in used and out-of-print books, stacked floor to ceiling in two branches, in Abids and in Lakdikapul, at a fraction of retail. Its own catalogue runs from children's books and comics to rare and collectible copies, first editions, signed copies and books over a hundred years old, with Telugu literature, novels and short stories in sections of their own. If a title is not on the shelves, the staff will usually try to find it, so asking is worth more than assuming. Allow more time than the errand seems to need. More on Best Book Centre.

Telugu and Urdu are the city's two official languages, and both have their own book world. For Telugu, besides the sections at Best Book Centre, there is the Hyderabad Book Trust, a not-for-profit publishing collective set up in 1980 to publish broad, socially engaged reading for Telugu readers; it sells its titles through its own online store.

For Urdu, Best Book Centre's own catalogue has an Urdu section too. The Old City has a different kind of Urdu address: in Chatta Bazaar, one of the oldest lanes of the Old City near Charminar, around 250 presses print wedding and invitation cards, and a few master calligraphers still letter the originals in Urdu and Arabic with a reed pen. They are used to being watched and will write out your name as a keepsake if you ask; working-day afternoons, when the presses run, are the time to go.