Bibliomania is a peculiar affliction. I have friends who travel hundreds and even thousands of kilometres to browse at antiquarian bookshops, when right next door we have Church Street – the book-lovers’ lane of Bengaluru and a major tourist attraction not only in literary circles. So, let us take a walk to Church Street and beyond. To place things in context, this walk begins in the old town, in the petes – or bazaars – where one experiences among other things, a book bazaar and some historical sites, following which there is a leisurely stroll through the greenery of Cubbon Park that has several cultural institutions of interest to bibliophiles, and then concludes in the Cantonment, which apart from plenty of book-shopping offers sights of literary interest. The total length is about 9 kilometres and it’ll take you at least 2.5 hours to cover the distance without breaks. However, there are nice cafés, bars, and restaurants along the way, which I shall point out to you as great resting places. So, budget 6 hours if you would like to include a leisurely lunch and some coffee stops, as well as browsing in bookshops. You can also divide this walk into 2 parts or even 3 shorter 3-kilometre walks. And there are metro stations, if you wish to move back and forth along the route. Furthermore, if you are just interested in the bookshops, you could begin walking from STOP NUMBER 11 which takes you for some great book-shopping and then also through the history of the city’s landmark bookshops. It would be ideal to start out at 10 AM. If you travel by public transport, exit the Sir Visvesvaraya Metro Station, also known as Central College station, from where it’s a 6-minute or 450-metre walk to our first destination. If coming by taxi or auto rickshaw, ask to get off at Mysore Bank Circle on KG Road, at the little temple that marks the beginning of the old town’s main bazaar – Avenue Road. And one important final pointer – simply follow the map on this app in case you’re unfamiliar with the areas described, to navigate from one point to the next. We have also included photos to help you identify the various buildings and sightseeing-worthy landmarks I’ll be describing. STOP NUMBER 1 – IN AVENUE ROAD, LET’s LOOK AT THE RICE MEMORIAL CHURCH After walking for a minute or two in this congested and bustling bazaar street, we see on our right the quiet little Rice Memorial Church: brightly painted in red with white columns, it stands out in its compound – one could, easily, imagine it being the pride of some Agatha Christie-style English village. Originally founded as the London Mission’s Canarese Chapel in the 1800s, it was later renamed to honour a missionary called Rice – but it has an important literary connection we must explore. This missionary gentleman’s son, Benjamin Lewis Rice who was born in India in 1837, chose a slightly different path – from childhood he was fluent in Kannada and over the years learnt many other Indian languages too. He worked as an educator, but also laboured on the side as a linguist, becoming a notable epigraphist and a non-fiction author. And if that wasn’t enough, he served as the part-time head of the Department of Archaeology and, additionally, founded the Bowring Institute in Saint Mark’s Road in 1888, it boasted according to a contemporary report “a reading-room, billiard tables, and tennis courts, and social entertainments, including musical evenings... It has probably the largest library in Bangalore”, and which today is a well-known haunt of the city’s elite, but also a venue for exclusive literary events. One only must pay many hundreds of thousands of rupees to join the club. In any case, the younger Rice became known as one of the leading scholars in 19th century Bengaluru, authoring still very readable gazetteers describing the region that now is Karnataka State. These remain among the best reference books on local history – and it was Rice, who was the first who started, comprehensively documenting the hero stones, or veeragallu, of Karnataka with the old Kannada script that he transcribed into English. The 250-metre stretch of AVENUE ROAD we just followed to get here has more than a dozen welcoming second-hand bookshops and who knows, one of them may have an ancient copy of one of the books Rice published. And if it is not a rainy day, you will also encounter some of the last pavement booksellers in town. Most of them peddle used textbooks that are mainly relevant for the students from the nearby college and other institutes on the CUBBON PARK side of the road. But if you dig around you will also find cheap second-hand novels left behind by tourists in the lodges and hotels at the nearby railway station. And if you are wondering if any famous author studied in the institutions here – yes, there is for example the novelist Shashi Deshpande, who describes walking from the bus station to her college as “peaceful and innocent and the people quaintly old-fashioned. Yet, incongruously, there were plenty of wine shops. People here drank, something that seemed to us, coming from Morarji Desai’s Bombay, shocking.