Off the shelf : On Books, Book People and Places

This is a book about one life—the author’s—and many other lives—of legendary writers, editors, publishers and booksellers—spent with words: written, printed and bound. Drawing upon years of reading and a long career in publishing, Sridhar Balan gives us stories and facts about some extraordinary people and places related to books. There are accounts of Dean Mahomed, the first Indian author in English, and E.V. Rieu, who set up Oxford University Press (OUP) in Bombay and later initiated the Penguin Classics series, translating Homer’s Odysseyeven as bombs fell around him in London. There are anecdotes about Roy Hawkins—‘Hawk’—who laid the foundation for some fine publishing at OUP, and Ravi Dayal, who carried on Hawk’s legacy. The remarkable career of Ram Advani, the legendary bookseller of Lucknow, is sketched along with that of Dhanesh Jain, an academic who manufactured buttons before he found his true calling and established Ratna Sagar, a pioneer in text-book publishing.