An unassuming garage in RA Puram houses a gold mine of the printed word. Nestled in an old, quiet apartment block, Rare Books, is a musty room, with its cold stone floor, numerous bursting boxes and overstuffed bookshelves that have first editions (including the very first editions of the Penguin series), books long out of print, Tamil literature, front pages of newspapers from the 1930s, National Geographic, Modern Review and Illustrated Weekly magazines from the early half of the century, and a well-preserved set of illustrations by political cartoonists like RK Laxman.