The cover story

What’s on the cover can be as interesting as what’s in between them, argues Deepali Singh

Read any good books lately as an ice breaker is passé. Saw any good book covers is the question that’s now being asked. Suddenly, as books change into something that will be seen more often on your computer screen than in your hands in the not-so-distant future, artists and publishers are celebrating a part of the book that may well lose its importance in the years to come — its cover.

Not surprisingly, a recent exhibition on book covers — The Art of the Book — held at Seagull Arts and Media Resource Centre in Calcutta evoked nostalgia from all quarters. Sunandini Banerjee, senior editor and graphic designer, had created digital collages out of covers, merging them with images and extracts from books published by Seagull. Not many who saw the pictures framed on the wall believed in the adage that books shouldn’t be judged by their covers. A good book, the experts argued, often had a good cover.

Full report here Telegraph

Seagull Books announces launch of its Africa List

Seagull Books, the Indian publishing house that will be present at the upcoming Cape Town Book Fair, has announced the launch of it’s “Africa List” – a series of books to be edited by Rosalind Morris and distributed by the University of Chicago Press.

The Africa List will join Seagull’s well-established French and German Lists. The publisher focuses on “classic and contemporary interventions, manifestos and book-length essays”, and says that it has lined up some of Africa’s top luminaries and newest savants for its latest venture.

Full report here Book Southern Africa

REVIEW: From Rajahs and Yogis to Gandhi & Beyond

REVIEW

From Rajahs And Yogis To Gandhi And Beyond: Images Of India In International Films Of The 20th Century
Vijaya Mulay
Seagull Books
Rs 695
Pp 350
ISBN: 1905422962
Paperback

Blurb
Brahmins named Iftikar, Buddhist rites in Hindu Shiva temples, Indian maidens dressed like Arabian harem girls--right from the birth of cinema, international movies have been wildly inventive in their fantastical imagining of India. In fact, images of India in these films have always said more about the filmmakers than they have about India. From the early 20th century, when India was imagined as the fabulous, exotic, oriental Other, site for all sorts of fantasies; to the imperial and colonial mindset of the middle decades of the 20th century; to postcolonial films and auteurs like Jean Renoir and Louis Malle who genuinely strove to understand a different culture and its values; to the globalized worldview with which the century ended--India as seen on the international screen has changed in intriguing ways, as this pioneering study describes and analyzes. Allowing us access to rare short films from the 1900s, British Durbar films, the precursors of the newsreel genre, and Empire adventure movies, this book also explores Melies, Lumiere, Louis Malle and Jean Renoir, moving on to the Raj films of the 1980s and international cinema of the late 20th century. In the process, a wide range of movies is examined and discussed, and a trajectory of changing images of India abroad is traced over the course of the last century.

Review 
Dear Cinema
The film society movement in India must get a huge proportion of the credit not only for having created the best filmmakers outside the mainstream – those like Satyajit Ray and Shyam Benegal but also for inspiring film critics, academics and film scholars, as it continues to do today. Vijaya Mulay, the author of the book under review is one of the pioneers of the movement, having been associated with ‘Indian film culture’ in its infancy and its formative years. Beginning her engagement with cinema more than 60 years ago, Vijaya Mulay (or ‘Akka’ to her friends) has seen Satyajit Ray at work and also come into close contact with international filmmakers like Louis Malle – when he was in India in the 1960s. Malle went on to make his celebrated series on India – later proscribed by Mrs Gandhi’s government for ‘showing India in bad light’.  Akka has an unmatched exposure to Indian and international cinema and this makes her the ideal person to document and trace the way in which India as a cultural space has been recorded and represented in international cinema from around the world. The book combines the diachronic or historical approach with the thematic one. It begins by dividing films according to eras rather than themes and this makes it extremely easy to follow but it also has separate sections for foreign filmmakers like Franz Osten, who worked in India in collaboration with Indians. After making ‘Orientalist’ films like Light of Asia (1925) and Shiraz (1928), Osten made Hindi classics like Achut Kanya (1936) Savitri (1937) and Kangan (1939).

Why Fair is Foul in Kolkata

When the lights went out for two hours on a peak Saturday evening, the International Kolkata Book Fair reached the nadir of its 34-year existence. Three days into the fair and little was in place, not even a back-up lighting plan. Leading up to the fair, booksellers had complained about cramped space, creaking infrastructure and dust in the air, but even when the fair opened on January 27, many of the stalls weren’t ready.

In what has become typical of West Bengal, another of Kolkata’s big-ticket events was being allowed to diminish year-on-year. Once it was the largest retailer book fair in Asia; very soon international publishers will shun it. In fact, many top publishers, having checked out the fair last year, excused themselves quietly this year. Hachette India, HarperCollins, Random House and Kolkata-based Seagull, to name a few, were prominent absentees.

Full report here Indian Express