Then it was Dickens, now it's blue books!

Tired and dis heartened, one of Kandy's best-loved men is folding up his tent. Many will miss him and sorely too. But how many others in the hurly-burly of this city will mark his passing?

M.R. Yusuf is an institution in his own right. A few of us - some of Kandy's "older codgers" - would drop in on him as often as we could. Old Yusuf would look up and his face would beam a welcome. We would stand around his beat-up table and talk "shop". Books, and more books, and how, not long ago, this was the place that would attract so many. Yusuf waxes indignant. "Schoolboys? Young fellows? Pah! They read nothing today!"

Yusuf is breaking camp. It has been, to this short, stocky man, a long road. He now finds it increasingly difficult to walk Kandy's torn-up pavements. "The second-hand book trade has been shot to pieces," he says. "Men sell stuff on the pavement now. Many have no idea of what they sell or why. It's all a sorry mess."

Meet, and say with me a fond farewell to M.R. Yusuf. It was his father, Sheikh Mohammed Yusuf Hasan, who launched "The Yusuf's Corner Book Stall" at the corner of Castle and King's Street in 1935 (near Raymond's undertakers today). There is little I need to say about that Aladdin's Cave of a shop, for my friend Tissa Devendra put it all on record in his fascinating article, "Booksellers, Buriyani and Barbers" in the Sunday Island of October 1, 1995. Allow me to quote:

"The signboard, The Yusuf's Corner Book Stall drew my schoolteacher-father and me through its crooked doorway and latticed windows into a dusty treasure trove. Books galore overwhelmed us - crammed on overloaded shelves, leaning towers of books, piled on the floor, rusty tin trunks with open lids spilling the musty odour of exotic old books. Trestle tables on the pavement outside tempted schoolboys with the comics of the day - Beano, Film Fun, Champion, Triumph and Gray Friars, fascinating chronicles of Desperate Dan, Stan and Ollie, Rockfish Rogan, RAF and Billy Bunter....

"Father was guided towards dusty volumes of history and travel; and also to the classic historical romances and adventures of his own boyhood. I waded with gusto into Hereward the Wake, The Last Days of Pompeii, and Tales of Shipwrecks and Daring-do by R.M. Ballantyne and Capt. Frederick Marryat, RN.... A few of these books still adorn my shelves, stamped with Yusuf's frank.... No other bookshop ever stole my heart and mind as Yusuf's Corner Book Stall."

M.R. Yusuf joined his father in the second-hand book trade when he was 15. He is 72 now, failing in health and too worn out to keep butting his head, as he says, against the brick walls of public ignorance and a crass new society of youngsters who seem to think that books are only of some use to their diseased egos if the covers seduce and the contents titillate.

"I get so mad at times," he says. "In the old days, this shop was full of schoolchildren. Their choice was R.L Stevenson and Rider Haggard and Hans Christian Anderson and Charles Dickens. Parents would come in to pick up 'Uncle Tom's 'Cabin' and 'The Scarlet' 'Pimpernel' and 'Kenilworth'. People lived well, read well. Now if there is a bunch of schoolboys, they stand in the street and ask, 'Uncle, you have any blue books?' I get so mad. I tell them to bring a chit from the police and I'll give them some red books!"

This is very true. Sadly true. I have sat in his little King's Street shop, watching a knot of young boys ogling old copies of women's magazines, fascinated by the colour advertisements of women in their underwear!

The schoolboys do not come now. They have been driven out by Yusuf too often to find it amusing. People do come, usually with a bag of books salvaged from some garage or store room. Much of what they bring are old magazines. They come to sell.... "and they ask Rs. 200 for an old book with broken binding and pages missing, and Rs. 25 for a magazine with half the pages torn away. They must be mad. Honestly, I'm fed up. I sat with my father until he died in 1958, and from that time I have run this shop alone. What is really horrible to know is how people have changed. I must be able to sell something that is acceptable, fair-priced and of good content. I recently sold a 1955 first edition of John Master's 'Coromandel!' for Rs. 125, and that's because I got it for Rs. 95. That was my father's dream too - good books cheap. Encourage the full man".

Yusuf moved with his father to the present shop in King's Street in 1945. He has been at the helm for 55 years and the new century holds little for him. "It's all gone," he says sadly. "Children don't read. English took a beating and now the new fad is translating everything from Tarzan to Dracula. I suppose I'm too old to understand. On the one hand people keep talking about the value of English. On the other English books are being translated and even English films are being dubbed. Just see how stupid Xena sounds with the Sinhalese voices. I think this is a move to further deprive people and especially the youngsters of the grandeur and richness of English."

With no children, no one to mark his footsteps, Yusuf will, in fading away, leave many of us with a deep sense of loss. Even disorientation. He would sit, a small squat figure behind this years - scarred table, waiting, holding that smile in check until somebody popped in. It was always a place to pop in and reminisce.

"How, Mr. Yusuf," and he would say, "How," and wait for the many rainbow bubbles to float as the talk swung back and forth. Then he would cough, clear his throat and say, "I have some old bound copies of 'London Illustrated'. Like to see?"

We are the losers today. What hurts most is the way it all has to end.

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