The Groaning Shelf and Other Instances of Book Love

Pradeep Sebastian

Notes from a bibliophile on the romance of book collecting, the beauty of dust jackets, the lure of rare and first editions, the thrill of browsing in second-hand bookshops, the bibliomania of book thieves, movies about books, the inner life of a reader, and of course, favourites. The delightful genre of Books About Books which looks at the book as physical object, as a crafted work of art where its bibliographical aspects – binding, typography, edition, condition, rarity – matter as much as the literary content inside, has seldom been explored in Indian writing with the cultic devotion displayed over these little essays that capture the drama of bookish obsession, the joys and snares of the bookish life, and the gentle madness that is book love.