One of TN Shanbhag’s favourite anecdotes was about how in 1951 he was one of the few booksellers in the country to order 1000 copies of Boris Pasternak’s Dr Zhivago. Pasternak of course won the Nobel Prize soon after and Shanbhag’s related favourite story was about how Jawaharlal Nehru, then prime minister of India, stopped by his shop at 10.30 one night in 1952 to pick up a copy. The prime minister bought another 21 books that night. Indeed, every regular at Strand was made to feel as important as a prime minister because nothing gave Shanbhag greater pleasure than people loving books.

For an indigent journalist scraping the barrel for a bit extra, Strand Book Stall was a haven. Mention a book you wanted to read and fabulous discounts were thrown at you. Of course Strand and Shanbhag did this for all book worms and there is no other bookshop in Mumbai, or maybe even the world, that envelopes you with a love and reverence for books the way Strand does. And what a treasure trove. A tiny space, shorn of all the gloss and fripperies we have come to associate with book shops, Strand was yet packed with gems. And packed with people who knew and had read all those gems. There was no author you asked Shanbhag about whom he did not know. And in his absence, the other staff filled in. The last couple of years, Shanbhag, 84, had been ailing and so meetings had become unfortunately rare.

Mumbai is often – and perhaps even sometimes rightly? – presented as a city of philistines. But Shanbhag was a city institution who broke all those myths. He and his shop towered above the world of books, and when Shanbhag spoke, everyone had to listen, sometimes reluctantly but always reverently. He was always on the side of the writer and the reader and worked his business around that.

With his death, Mumbai has lost a very precious part of itself.

So have I and countless other fans like me.

(A version of this appeared in the DNA dated February 28)