Bibliofile

The cottage industry in books by Khushwant Singh grinds on. Not to be outdone by Roli's ingenious way of repackaging his Train to Pakistan as an illustrated book, the usually sober Oxford University Press has decided to sex up one of his bestselling titles with them: History of the Sikhs. Instead of the scholarly two volumes, recently updated up to Manmohan Singh ascending the prime ministerial chair,OUP plans to launch an illustrated version in a single volume. The USP: rare photographs collected from museums and libraries around the world.

Looks like Jaswant Singh is facing competition. There's another writer who claims writing four books at the same time is as easy as writing one at a time. "You don't need to move from one computer to another," says Meghnad Desai, "but can move from one paragraph of the first book to another from the second and so on, all in one's mind." And as if to prove this true, the Lord from Westminster has just come out with Divided by Democracy by his "publisher-in-law", Roli. He has also just submitted his first novel to Penguin. And is hard at work on his biography of Gandhi. But thankfully for him, he's still at the reading stage as far as Gandhi goes. With a 100 volumes of Gandhi's collected works to wade through, who knows how many more books Meghnad will come out with in the interim?

It's not just Vikram Seth who is embarrassed with the size of his "ludicrous" advances. Random House's Simon Littlewoodadmitted the other day that the bids that were flying about during the auction six years ago left Random House feeling distinctly uneasy. "We had to withdraw eventually," he says, but it'll be months before he knows for sure whether they were wrong in not taking the risk.