Pradeep Sebastian has been an avid bibliophile and book collector for over a decade. In this collection of essays, he paints in full splendour the picture of a life devoted to the romance of books, blending personal experience, revelatory conversations and bewitching legends from the world of books. Meet the biryani chef guarding a prized Ottoman manuscript, track the mysterious 'Book Prince' of Kolkata, and visit the cottage in Kodaikanal that lures book collectors with its siren song. Discover how an emperor's defeat brought illuminated manuscripts into sixteenth-century India, how a rare 1865 edition of Alice in Wonderland surfaced in an Indian bazaar, and much more. An Inky Parade is a window into the charming world of antiquarian book trade in India and around the world, as well as an ode to the book as an object of art, sure to delight every reader.
Awarded with the 15th ILAB Breslauer Prize for Bibliography 2010. This classic can be ranked among the well-known international standard works on the subject of bookbinding. The author, Dr. Jan Storm van Leeuwen, gives in this work an elaborate general historical introduction to his subject. It also contains a general introduction to each province, as they were known in the eigteenth century, and an extensive overall picture of the towns where luxury bindings were manufactured, describing the bookbinder's workshops and binderies of each town. The historical introduction is completed with a catalogue of the approximately 2000 relevant bindings in the collections of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (National Library of the Netherlands) and its sister institution the Museum Meermanno-Westreenianum. About 1500 other bindings that the author studied over time in other collections are also described. But the most important feature of this work is that all (nearly 10.000) stamps on these bindings are represented by a picture. Never before so many bindings (3500) have been recorded, described and discussed in such detail and with the benefit of an established model and terminology. The print edition is available as a set of four volumes (9789061943693).