Bibliofile

Arbiter, Arbitrary

You’d think publishers are arbiters of what books we read. But even publishers confess to being clueless about which of their books will turn into bestsellers. The fickle reader has turned more unpredictable, ignoring some best-written literary books while lifting others like Amish Tripathi’s The Immortals of Meluha into an astounding 60,000 seller. Similarly with literary awards. The shortlist for the Costa book awards is out, and possibly for the first time the shortlist in the first book category is dominated by either Indians, or pios, but not of the expected Salman Rushdie sort. Witness the Night by Kishwar Desai, Coconut Unlimited by Nikesh Shukla and The Temple-Goers by Aatish Taseer are among the four first books on the list.

She Carries Weight

It was Chetan Bhagat’s ambition to cross the 1,00,000 copies sold mark in a year. But dietician Rujuta Diwekar has gone one step up: the first print run of her forthcoming Women and Weight Loss Tamasha is a record 1,00,000. When Random House published her Don’t Lose Your Mind, Lose Your Weight last year, they began with an ambitious target: 10,000. It went on to sell 1,50,000-2,00,000 copies in less than a year.

The Haddock Test

When Ajay Mago of Om Books approached Hindi poet Puneet Gupta to translate Tintin into Hindi, Puneet didn’t dream the Belgian boy detective would pose such a stiff challenge. The trickiest phrase: “billions and billions of blue blistering barnacles.” How to get the right alliteration and flavour? After a week of mulling, Puneet came up with: “karodon karod kale kasmasate kacchwe (crores and crores of black, squirming turtles).”