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Don’t walk into CMYK expecting to find the next big thing in pop culture, Bookstagram, or even, depending on what you like, literature. They’ve been around for a while in Lodhi Colony, but with their recent boost of two more floors, the bookstore’s all but reinforced their love for huge, hardbound ‘coffee table’ books that veer towards non-fiction, cookbooks, history, and even graphic novels.
Here, you discover words and pictures of the kind typically stuffed away in commercial bookstores. To be fair, they do plan to house some fiction… and you’re also spoiled for choice for good reads in Delhi.
At the tempting risk of sounding like a traveller blog of the 2000s, I must recount this, since CMYK's an academic haven just short of a library card. My sister being an economics major and my studying English have inspired several jokes about polar opposites. History and food are near the top of the list of where we find a lot to talk about, where we find anecdotes from our notes that the other finds interesting, and we did, standing in CMYK.
The tight curation – possibly, in fact, one of if not the tightest in the city – will inevitably cause a good conversation. Large, pretty picturebooks, of course, help, as does a caffeine rush. (Meherchand Market’s snowballed with places; my recommendation here would be Devan’s or Roastery.)
We visited CMYK just as their very first exhibition cropped up, too; a set of seven black-and-white photographs of Delhi by William Dalrymple hung around the stairs, leading you up to the top floor where you could find manuscripts on, say, the life of Mirza Ghalib, or the chronicles of how the capital of British India shifted from then Calcutta to Delhi with old construction plans, maps by John George Bartholomew, and other books dating back to the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries about the city – either framed or carefully glass-guarded. I’m told some of them are the only copies that exist. They’re calling this floor their archival room. These may have disappeared from the room by now, which is only your sign to be surprised by whatever comes next.
Much like its neighbour in the area, The Bookshop Inc – of which I am like a moth to light, and which I will now be combining CMYK with for my Lodhi wanderings post coffee – there’s something of a well-travelled grandmother’s attic library’s essence to CMYK. Despite this old-world charm, CMYK is a thin, contemporarily designed space, brightened like the small-lit, hip coffeeshops of its neighbourhood. There are cushion pads and a table for you to sit beneath shelves on the first floor, which are good signs that loitering and staring will mostly be allowed. They’re planning to host more exhibitions, lectures, and even heritage walks, having started with one around Lodhi Art District itself.
CMYK, incidentally, also has presences in Mumbai, Chennai and Puducherry. News of their GK II branch closing in South Delhi, of which I don’t have a clear memory despite visiting and seeing a much wider collection, came around the same time as their new floors in Lodhi. Good things take time, and I believe this place, like their extraordinarily well-kept ancient stuff, will age well.
Getting there: Come from the JLN Stadium metro station or the Jangpura station on the violet line. Traffic near the bookstore tends to get heavier towards the evening.