Some places you visit for the destination. Others, the journey is the whole point. My trip to Abbasi Kutub Khana, Karachi’s oldest bookshop, founded in 1910, was very much the second kind.
The shop sits deep inside Juna Market (old market), off the city’s bustling Napier Road, in what was once one of the earliest settlements outside the old city. Getting there today is an experience in itself. You walk through lane after lane of spice sellers, dry fruit stalls, metalworkers, utensil and cutlery shops, and the leather market that the bookshop is tucked inside of, all layered on top of each other in that wonderful old-city chaos.
In its earlier decades, Juna Market was Karachi’s book district. Around a dozen bookstores once operated here after independence in 1947, and the shop’s visitor list once read like a who’s who of the city’s intellectual life, scholars and writers came through these same narrow aisles. One by one, the other bookshops closed, and Abbasi Kutub Khana is now the only one left standing in the market. It is still, by reputation, the place readers turn to when a book cannot be found anywhere else in the city.
Easy to miss if you’re not looking for it. The sign for Abbasi Kutub Khana hangs above a doorway deep in Juna Market’s leather quarter.
Step through the doorway and the market noise falls away. Wrought iron window grilles, worked into old floral patterns, filter the daylight into soft geometric shadows across stacks piled almost to the ceiling. Every surface holds something: shelves sag gently under decades of collected knowledge, tied bundles of thin paperbacks rest in careful stacks, bare bulbs hang on their wires and cast a warm, low light over spines in Urdu, Pashto, Arabic, Sindhi, Persian, and English. Wooden and painted metal ladders lean against the shelving, smoothed by years of climbing toward the topmost rows.
Light falls through old ironwork onto shelves of Urdu classics. This corner alone could hold you for an hour.
Books stacked to the ceiling, reached only by a worn ladder. Every shelf here carries its own quiet history.
The shop is small, barely a few dozen square yards across a ground floor and two upper levels, yet it holds thousands of titles, some brand new, some decades old, gathered over more than a hundred years of one family’s devotion to books. Narrow aisles force you to turn sideways, and every turn reveals another pocket crammed with spines, some wrapped in plastic against Karachi’s humidity, some open and waiting to be picked up.
The light shines on the old pages.
The multiple stories in the small book shop are connected via wooden stairs.
Near the back, a small desk holds a chair, a spiral of incense, and more books stacked within arm’s reach. This is where I found Habib Hussain Abbasi, the shop’s current custodian, in a quiet conversation. He has been coming here since he was a schoolboy, changing out of his uniform behind the counter before helping his father, and he still describes a single day away from the shop as a kind of hunger. I spent a long while in that corner too, and it felt like the shop itself was breathing slowly around me, patient and unhurried, indifferent to the noise of the market outside.
A small desk tucked among the shelves, the corner where Habib Hussain Abbasi has spent a lifetime among books.
We spoke about the kind of books I was looking for, and he pointed me toward a few titles I would never have found on my own. Watching him move through the shelves, knowing exactly where each book lived, was its own kind of quiet performance, more than a hundred years of family memory built into the geography of paper and wood.
Faded covers and half-forgotten titles, the kind of find you only stumble on in a shop like this.
Row after row of bound volumes, wrapped carefully against the humidity, waiting for the right reader.
If you’re a reader, or just someone who likes wandering through the layers of old Karachi, walk the lanes of Juna Market until you find this door. It’s worth every step, and it’s a piece of the city’s history that’s still, quite literally, open for business.
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