International Book Service

Opened in 1931 beside the Deccan Gymkhana post office and usually named as the oldest bookshop in Pune, this was a pioneer of importing British and American titles; Nehru, Ambedkar and Radhakrishnan are among the visitors on record. The shop is small, about 1,500 sq ft, and shelves some 26 subject sections from the humanities to yoga, now in association with BookGanga. It is not a browsing megastore, and that is the point: come for the backlist, the crowded spines and nine decades of the city's reading habit.

Nine decades of Pune's reading life in one small Deccan shopfront