 Like most bookshops of the time, the store also stocked fancy leather goods, toys, perfume, albums, photo frames, indoor games, playing cards and silver and electroplated goods.It features in the memoirs of many eminent British and Indian figures of the twentieth century, and has always played a part in the city's life.In the 1970s, during the Naxalite rising, it was used as a message drop-off point by activists, who would slip notes into particular books for other members of their group to find.