Books As Art

Pocket art should be an oxymoron, but with a recently launched series, Roli Books has overcome the limitation of size with excellent reproductions of nostalgic images as well as art.

Printed on art card, the treatment has the quality of postcards (you have to turn the page over to read the captions), which may have been the original inspiration for the manner in which these books have been designed. Accompanied by a small introduction of 16 pages, and consisting of 24 plates each, the range of subjects is interestingly varied.

The series has been launched with a collection of 10 books, each for Rs 150. Four of these concentrate on artists Manjit Bawa, GR Santosh, A Ramachandran, while the last looks at Kalighat paintings with examples from the National Museums and Galleries of Wales.

Two others, on Agra and Delhi, are based on paintings of monuments that are part of the collection at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London.

The remaining four are photographic essays: the best work of photographer Raghu Rai, Bollywood images of stars, a monograph on Satyajit Ray at work, and finally, ancient photographs of Landour and Mussoorie, enticingly combined with