The streets may be mean and choking, but therein lie gems

Priscilla Muthoni couldn’t believe her luck, but there it was, complete with the timeless standard bearer of classic books, the Penguin logo. The book was Jack Kerouac’sOn the Road, a publication long out of print.

Priscilla, a voracious reader and confessed bibliophile had been looking for the hard copy of Kerouac’s book for years. Finally finding the book, says Pricilla felt like digging out a chunk of gold from the mound of used books at a bookstand along Tom Mboya street in Nairobi.

“It is now a respected elder in my collection,” she laughs.

The gold analogy isn’t too off the mark;On the Road, published in 1957 is still revered as one of the best works to emerge from the Beat Generation-a literary genus that swerved from the staid, starchy fare of writing that marked the first six decades of the 20th century, introducing in its place an almost irreverent, defiant, breezy prose that defined the 60s and early 70s. It is the type you won’t find in a bookshop.

For her trouble, Muthoni forked all of Sh100, for a book whose original manuscript was purchased for a staggering USD2.43 million (about Sh200 million in today’s exchange rate) by Jim Irsay, owner of the Indianapolis Colts of the National Football League in 2001.

Over the past five years, second-hand book stands have proliferated in nearly all major towns and cities. They are on street corners and in back alleys, the books going for a pittance, allowing readers on a shoestring budget to stock their shelves with the vendors raking in a fortune in the process.

DEATH OF THE BOOKSHOP

These unconventional markets are fondly-and at times derisively, referred to asInama.Inama is the Swahili term for ‘lean’ or ‘bend forward', because to peruse the collection one has no choice but to arc forward or squat. But that is a small price to pay when you can cart home an armload of books, from Grisham to Kellerman and even the mushy Nicholas Sparks, for the price of one book at a pricey bookshop.

The growth and appeal of second-hand books (actually some are brand new) has been occasioned by a number of factors, one of them the prohibitive pricing of some of the books sold in traditional bookshops and also the new preference for school curriculum books over general reads in most bookshops across the country, and also the high probability of finding rare books.

Driven by the prevailing tenuous economic environment, the streets are a pair of welcoming hands for readers, many of whom are on a shoestring budget, or in college.

For example while one might chance upon Malcolm Gladwell’sOutliers at an Inama for the asking price of Sh300, the same item, albeit not used, might be snickered for Sh800 in a bookshop.

And it goes both ways. Mr Alfred Ngunjiri has been vending used books in Nairobi for the past three years. He has connections and a distribution network that allow him to ship in carton loads of books mostly from the US.

“I’ll say I make a decent living from my books,” he says. “I have developed a relationship with customers over time, and I know the kind of books many of them want to read.”

While Alfred, a former salesman in a bookshop, was cagey divulging the average income he takes home on a good day, he let it known he would never settle for a paid job, saying: “That is something I will tell you, it feeds us, and I make a fairly good living.”

All of the names

Yasmin Noor’s eclectic collection has been growing steadily ever since she discovered the street gold two years ago. Her first purchase was the poet Longfellow Wordsworth’sSong of Hiawatha. She was sold, and ever since, Noor has been buying about five books every two months.

“I will see a book and say, I’ll probably not find it next time so I just buy and hope to read after finishing the one I’d be reading,” she said while digging into a load of books near Odeon Cinema.

“Where else can I get such works for so low a price?” Another reason that has made it convenient for street book vendors to operate is the environment in which they operate.

Unlike sellers of other merchandise who must contend with the threat of perpetual running battles with county askaris. With a permit, book sellers are assured of relative peace.

Like Yasmin Noor, I am anInamadisciple. I joined the brigade when I once came across four hard-bound volumes of Reader’s Digest Nonfiction condensed books with the tongue of a book-mark string sticking out. Each volume cost Sh100, and so in essence I bought 16 books for Sh400!

In one of the volumes was Nelson Mandela’sLong Walk to Freedom and in another,The Man who Changed the World— a biography of former USSR leader Mikhail Gorbachev, and also In theAbsence of Angels— a heart-wrenching account of loss and pain in the early years of the AIDs epidemic.

In 2014, I purchased a book titled,Best of American Sports Writing(BASW)-an annual anthology of the best sports-related works published in the US in a given year. My interest was in basketball and I found plenty of works by writers I had read inSports Illustratedmagazine. I kept finding these books, and the library grew.

READING CULTURE

The Series editor, a man named Glenn Stout had been at the helm for more than two decades and I looked him up on Facebook.

He was interested about our reading culture and how I acquired the sports collection books. I wrote back that I bought them in the streets and had a sizeable collection.

That was about all. When the BASW 2017 came out, I opened the mailbox in Othaya town and found a big yellow envelope, postmarked US. Inside was an autographed copy of the book. I was delightfully shocked, and, I am not particularly proud of this, seized by vanity when I read the introduction page and saw my name.

Stout, the editor, had written: “The way each of these volumes finds its way into a reader’s hands creates its own story. One Kenyan reader … came across his first copy of this book a few years ago at a street vendor in Nairobi.”

The streets have it.

My collection now is legion; books with flaky pages, others dog-eared. A few of them bear scrawls of autographs signed to former owners. And once a picture of a smiling infant slipped out of a book, the way one might find a dollar bill from the pocket of a jacket.

The sidewalks may be mean, dystopic even, and choking with humanity, but they are also stocked with the finest of rubies and distant, ink-soaked names from West Africa, and Europe and America.

It is almost impossible to describe the feeling of arcing forward at the local Inama and finding some of these names, famous names, alive and dead, buried deep in anthill of dead trees.

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Why Inama culture is thriving in towns

Availability:Looking a book? Not in the bookshops? Worry not. You have been searching in the wrong places. On the streets you are guaranteed to find works not available in stores.

Affordability:Worried it will cost you a fortune? Well, believe it or not you will spend much less than you imagined.

Customer service:Once you buy and the vendor establishes your taste then they will not tire looking for those titles. Vendors will even go to the extent of importing titles specifically for their customers.

Accessibility:You must have noticed there more vendors than bookshops in any town. For that reason, it is easier to get a title from the vendor than travel kilometres looking for a shop.