The kind of readers I have seen in Calcutta is nowhere else to be found across the country.” Veteran publisher Rajendra Kumar Mehra of Rupa & Co. commented in the course of his acceptance speech after being felicitated on Senior Citizen’s Day at the Book Fair last Friday.
The 77-year-old publisher, who grew up in Calcutta and moved the business to Delhi in 1970 after starting out under his granduncle’s stewardship in their Bankim Chatterjee Street outlet, spoke in Bengali. “I asked people in my office to come over and find out from readers what they are looking for. Without readers, we cannot exist,” he said.
The publishing house, for which Satyajit Ray had designed the first colophon, is turning 90 this year. Mehra’s autobiographical account, titled Never Out of Print, was on sale at the fair, chronicling recollections of the man who has received the Chevalier de l’ordre national du merite from the French government for promoting French literature, among other accolades.
“This is the third year that we are giving this award. Our earlier recipients in this category are Debajyoti Datta of Sishu Sahitya Samsad and Ranjan Sarkar of Ananda Publishers. We also give two other awards to a voracious reader and a veteran author,” said Tridib Chatterjee, general secretary of the Publishers and Booksellers Guild.
This year, the other two awards went to Nirmal Kanti Bhattacharya, an editor who has worked in Sahitya Akademi and National Book Trust and currently in Niyogi Books, and poet Mridul Dasgupta.