Discover the best day and night markets across Asia, organized by country and location to help you find local treasures.
College Street Book Market (Kolkata)
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College Street Book Market (Kolkata)
Kolkata's Boi Para, a 900-metre street of new and second-hand bookstalls described as the largest second-hand book market in the world.
College Street, known as Boi Para (Book Town), is a 900-metre street in central Kolkata running from Bidhan Sarani to Bowbazar. Bookshops and kiosks spill onto the pavement, selling textbooks, works by new authors, second-hand books with notes in the margins, rare first editions and titles up to about 250 years old, in every major Indian language and several foreign ones.
Bargaining is common, and rare books are sometimes sold cheaply. The street takes its name from the colleges around it, including Presidency University (founded 1817 as Hindoo College) and the University of Calcutta (1857). The Indian Coffee House, a long-time haunt of Kolkata's intellectuals, is a good place to rest.
