v Preferred Timings: 9.00 am-9.00 pm
v Admission Fee: Free and open to allv Photography charges: nilv How to Reach: Tourists can either take local buses from various points within the city to reach this locality or they can hire auto-rickshaws, taxis or take the metro rail.v Nearest Railway Station: Old Delhi Railway Stationv Nearest Metro Station: Chawri Bazaar
Students to artists to designers to theorists to activists – Daryaganj is the favourite place to be on a Sunday. Life begins at 7am every Sunday, over the decades for its thriving old book bazaar. This bazaar is a paradise for book lovers all over Delhi and beyond, as a mind-boggling variety of rare books are usually available in this market at very affordable prices.
Today after so many centuries, Daryaganj is still a market but now, an over populated busy and congested one. Now, it has the office of some of the most well known distributors, publication houses and organisations of the country, apart from the good Indian restaurants and shops selling different kinds of books. Near Daryaganj's Golcha cinema, the bazaar is the only source of income for many of its 200 pavement booksellers. The books sold in this bazaar are mostly second hand. However, that does not affect the quality of the reading material available. You have everything from fiction to medical sciences, architecture to cookery books, comics to atlases, fiction to computers, classics to magazines, management to hobbies. You name it and this place has it. It is hard to classify the books here in a specific order, but a patient search will certainly yield in what you are looking for. Whether it is a book on cooking, computer engineering or a book by Charles Dickens, Shakespeare, Premchand and Sharad Chand, Ravindra Nath Tagore, they have it all at cheap rates.
Why would someone buy books from here? Obviously, they are cheaper. "Equally importantly," said Gupta, "some books, which are difficult to find in usual bookstores are easily available here because they are taken off the shelves by publishers due to little demand." While the cost of the books depends on one's bargaining capacity, many can be purchased for as low a price as Rs 10. Is not just books in English, you will find Urdu, Arabic, and Hindi by the cartload. Plus, all those foreign language books discarded by tourists also find their way here.
