The only book shop in Ludhiana, Lyall Book Depot, is an example of the journey of a newspaper hawker, Lala Sunder Dass, who always nurtured a passion for books along with distributing newspapers in the city.
After his migration from Pakistan, he started his life counting newspapers for distributing, but soon set up a small shop in Chaura Bazar, which now is the only book shop in the city having rich collection of bestsellers.
Lala ji was popularly known all for his rich collection of books and importantly among the authors and writers. After partition, Lyall Book Depot was the richest book shop in the city. Now, the next generation of Sunder Dass are continuing his father’s work passionately.
Tarun Dass, grandson of Lala ji, told Daily Post that in this technology driven era, interest in reading among the youngsters have been declined drastically. He claimed that “earlier we were having only books and novels of different authors and writers but now the demand is of only text-books.

A few youngsters step in the book shop to purchase general books and novels. Usually people waste their time in social networking sites. There are readers but many of them have changed their option of reading from books to e-reading.” Tarun further added that their store was the highest income tax paying book store in the region. Now, people usually come to the store only for the book that is in the need of particular exam. He added that now books of fiction stories including that of Chetan Bhagat and Robin Sharma are in the demand. Usually teachers, academicians, scholars and literary readers visit the shop to buy a particular book that is not available in the market. We are having a publication in the name of ‘Kalyani’ for text-books which was established in 1963. Kalyani is the brain-child of late Lala Sunder Das. His vision was to provide variety of books to the students at an affordable price and to encourage the Indian authors.

For more news updates Follow and Like us on Facebook