Rupa began on a Calcutta pavement in 1936, when D. Mehra, an impecunious but driven salesman, decided to try his hand at selling books.

Within a generation, he had established Rupa as a major purveyor of imported books. Successive generations would make the firm the country’s leading distributor of English-language trade books, representing some of the world’s most important publishers, including Penguin, HarperCollins, Faber and many more.

As the company grew, it began publishing its own titles. Legendary film-maker Satyajit Ray designed the publishing house’s first colophon and became one of its earliest patrons.

Other notables on the Rupa list included sportsmen like Sunil Gavaskar, whose memoir, Sunny Days, gave it one of its bestsellers; Chetan Bhagat, who would go on to become India’s largest-selling author within a few years; and Ruskin Bond, the country’s most beloved writer. Over the decades, as the Indian publishing milieu was reshaped by new entrants from around the world, Rupa continued to maintain its position as a fiercely independent publisher of important books, at the forefront of the Indian publishing scene.

Besides providing readers with an engrossing account of how the publishing business works, the book is studded with stories of the idiosyncratic behavior of literary stars, eye-opening anecdotes of how some of the country’s biggest bestsellers came to be published and tips on what it takes to make a bestseller. Eye-opening and entertaining, Never Out of Print is the story of a publishing firm that has revolutionized the way books are published, marketed, sold and read in India.

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