Rupa began on a Calcutta pavement in 1936, when D. Mehra, an impecunious but driven salesman,
decided to try his hand at selling books. Within a generation, he had established Rupa as a major
purveyor of imported books. Successive generations would make the firm the country’s leading
distributor of English-language trade books, representing some of the world’s most important publishers,
including Penguin, HarperCollins, Faber and many more. As the company grew, it began publishing
its own titles. Legendary film-maker Satyajit Ray designed the publishing house’s first colophon and
became one of its earliest patrons. Other notables on the Rupa list included sportsmen like Sunil
Gavaskar, whose memoir, Sunny Days, gave it one of its bestsellers; Chetan Bhagat, who would go
on to become India’s largest-selling author within a few years; and Ruskin Bond, the country’s most
beloved writer. Over the decades, as the Indian publishing milieu was reshaped by new entrants
from around the world, Rupa continued to maintain its position as a fiercely independent publisher
of important books, at the forefront of the Indian publishing scene.
Besides providing readers with an engrossing account of how the publishing business works, the
book is studded with stories of the idiosyncratic behavior of literary stars, eye-opening anecdotes
of how some of the country’s biggest bestsellers came to be published and tips on what it takes to
make a bestseller.
Eye-opening and entertaining, Never Out of Print is the story of a publishing firm that has revolutionized the way books are published, marketed, sold and read in India.
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