The Groaning Shelf and Other Instances of Book Love

The delightful genre, Books About Books, which looks at the book as a physical object, as a crafted piece of art, where its bibliographical aspects like binding, typography, edition, condition and rarity matter as much as the literary content inside - has seldom been explored in Indian writing. These essays capture the drama of bookish obsession, the joys and snares of the bookish life and the gentle madness that is book love. In this collection of essays Pradeep Sebastian brings together 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, films about books, the inner life of a reader and, of course, the author's favourite books.