Off the Shelf
About This Book
Off the Shelf is the story of one life spent among books and of the many other lives that crossed it: writers, editors, publishers and booksellers. Sridhar Balan draws on years of reading and a long career in publishing to tell stories about remarkable people and places connected with the written, printed and bound word. The cast is wide. There is Dean Mahomed, the first Indian author in English, and E.V. Rieu, who translated the Odyssey while bombs fell on London and later started the Penguin Classics series. Roy Hawkins, known as Hawk, laid the groundwork for fine publishing at Oxford University Press in India, and Ravi Dayal carried that legacy forward. Ram Advani, the celebrated bookseller of Lucknow, is profiled alongside Dhanesh Jain, an academic who made buttons before he found his true calling and founded Ratna Sagar, a pioneer in textbook publishing. Balan also recalls the launch of Jim Corbett's Man-Eaters of Kumaon in New York and of Salim Ali's The Handbook of Indian Birds at Indira Gandhi's residence in New Delhi. He describes a memorable meeting between Andre Malraux and Nehru in Paris, and tells how a nun came to buy an erotic novel at Delhi's World Book Fair. Nostalgic and witty, the book is full of memories and curious detail, and it will appeal to anyone who loves books and the people behind them.
ISBN: 9789389231854
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