CALCUTTA’S EDIFICE: THE BUILDINGS OF A GREAT CITY (Rupa, Rs 3,500) by Brian Paul Bach aspires to be not only an exhaustive survey of the city’s architecture but also a personal account of its peculiar and varied life (“a semi-detached view”) from the perspective of an outsider who is also an “appreciator”. Bach lives and works as a maps specialist in America. But this huge volume of 700-odd pages rambles along, often rather pointlessly, collecting redundant, highly subjective and imprecise information (which is the university founded by Keshab Chandra Sen one wonders, on p. 236), together with a great deal of unsolicited advice. The photographs are also of extraordinarily poor quality. The cholera map is from the Twenties; the colonial interior is of the Municipal Corporation around the same time; and the Art Deco building is on Southern Avenue.