The beginning
I had set up small book stores of around 250-300 sq ft for a hotel chain and I used to buy books for the shops. Every time I looked at the catalogues, I found that what we were getting in India was not even a fraction of what was being published.
Somebody sitting somewhere in Bombay (now Mumbai) used to decide what books to import and he was doing that without getting to know what the readers here wanted. So, there was a complete disconnect between the person who was choosing the books and the person who was buying the books.
That was when I found out that there was a huge market out there for books which till then never came to India.
If I were to put all those books into a store, it couldn't be done in a space of 250 sq ft. In those days, book stores meant 80-90% text books. It was believed then that book stores needed text books to survive and the icing on the top was a few works of fiction. I genuinely felt there is a market for other books.
Opens Landmark
That was how Landmark was born as a general book shop in a large air-conditioned space in 1987. Air-conditioned, because the climate in Chennai required that for customers and books.
I wrote 30 names in my book for the book store, and every day I would knock off one name. What was left was Landmark.
I also felt, as India shopped in families, a pure book shop model would not work; it had to be a multi-product store. That was the format I had visualised though I had not seen any such book shop in my life. It was a format I evolved. Nothing like the Landmark format exists anywhere in the world. And it worked!
We started Landmark with Rs 12 lakh (Rs 1.2 million) and 18 employees. It was my brother, who was into the garments business, who put up the money in the beginning.
As we couldn't afford a showroom on Mount Road, we took a basement in an office building on Nungambakkam High Road. In those days, the whole of Nungambakkam High Road used to get five cars in the evening! No retailer was there on that road. Everybody kept saying it was a big risk that I took and that we should be in a showroom. But we couldn't afford any other place.
Landmark book store soon became a landmark in Chennai. In the image, a woman walks in front of a bookshelf at a book store. Photograph: Giuseppe Cacace/AFP/Getty Images
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