From socks to books: A publisher's story

Never Out of Print: The Rupa Story

Author: Rajen Mehra

Publisher: Rupa

Price: Rs 500

Pages: 504

More than 20 years ago, when Rupa Publications’ commissioning editor asked me to write a small book on actor Madhubala, I took up the offer without much knowledge about the business of book publishing. One was none the wiser all these years. Never Out of Print: The Rupa Story written by Rajen Mehra, the chairman of Rupa Publications, makes one considerably less ignorant about the complex world of book publishing, marketing, distributing et al. An engrossing story, though lacking in essential dates and with some proofing errors, the book traces the rise of a domestic publishing house that started from scratch.

Rajen Mehra’s ancestors had come from Peshawar to Calcutta (now Kolkata) via Lahore, Amritsar and Benaras (now Varanasi). They were hard-working hosiery sellers. Rajen Mehra’s granduncle, Daudayal Mehra, sold socks and stockings in Calcutta’s iconic New Market. How he switched to selling books and laid the foundation of a home-grown publishing house that was later on a par with the western publishing giants in the country is the stuff of bestsellers.

The story goes that a Scottish bookseller, K J Marshall, noticed Daudayal’s persuasive selling skills and approached him to sell English books, inviting the reluctant, dhoti-clad, school drop-out to the tony Grand Hotel for a meeting. To cut a long story short, on August 17, 1936, Daudayal started selling three titles on a pavement opposite Presidency College, one of which was the Collins Gem English Dictionary. Fifty seven years later, in London, his grandnephew would sign a joint-venture deal with HarperCollins, a descendant of Collins.

Daudayal’s first sale was to Professor Humayun Kabir, later minister of education in independent India. It was a propitious beginning and within a year, he started a company called Rupa, named after a character he had seen in a Sisir Bhaduri play. 

With family members pitching in, Rupa did brisk business. World War II’s shadows over Calcutta compelled the company to temporarily shift base to Allahabad. The ever-enterprising Daudayal also started supplying books to Jawaharlal Nehru in jail. The company is still very proud of this; Never Out of Print proudly displays letters Nehru wrote to his daughter mentioning Rupa.

If World War II took Rupa’s footprints to Allahabad, the Naxalite revolution in the 1960s and 1970s in Bengal led to Rajen joining his granduncle in the book trade. Violence unleashed by the Naxalites disrupted the education of many youngsters, but, instead of wasting his time doing nothing when classes were cancelled, Rajen started helping out at Rupa’s office on Bankim Chatterjee Street. This entailed sweeping the floors, dusting the books and arranging them in alphabetical order. Learning on the job taught the young Rajen the nitty-gritty of selling books.

Next, his granduncle sent him to different cities to learn about the distribution of books. Travelling by train, sleeping in waiting rooms, Rajen learnt the importance of austerity as well. By now, Rupa had the exclusive and non-exclusive distribution rights of 24 British publishers, having come a long way from the three titles with which it started out. But Daudayal still believed in cutting costs.

Simultaneously, he encouraged his family to learn Bengali and read Bengali literature. “Hindi was our mother tongue. Bengali was the language we worshipped,” his grandnephew writes. Not surprisingly, when Daudayal decided to diversify into publishing, he started by printing Bengali classics and translations from other languages into Bengali. Calcutta’s passionate book lovers ensured that these books flew off the shelves.

In 1970, Rajen was sent to Delhi to open an office there. After roughing it out on the floor of a mosquito-ridden room for some days, the youngster struck a deal for an office space in Daryaganj, the Mecca of most leading publishing houses. An office by day, and his home by night, from this space Rajen spread his wings far and wide, even making unpleasant incidents a reason to soar to greater heights.

When Penguin Books, whose paperbacks Rajen had aggressively distributed, though they were considered infra dig by elitist bookshops at the time, abruptly cut its 57-year-old ties with Rupa, and the joint venture with HarperCollins ended suddenly, Rajen decided to ramp up Rupa’s own publishing business and stop being at the mercy of western publishers.

Disappointment of another kind was felt when, after working hard to bring out two large tomes of JRD Tata’s letters and speeches, sifting through 40,000 manuscripts within three months, as senior executives of the Tata group demanded, the latter did not have the courtesy to invite Rajen to the lavish launch of the books at the Taj Hotel.

But for every such incident there were several exhilarating ones, such as when the French government awarded him the Chevalier de L’Ordre National du Merite in 2004. Or when his son, Kapish, and David Davidar jointly started Aleph Book Company with Rupa as its parent company. And, of course, the sales figures of books he published made up for all the setbacks in his career.

What is creditable about this book is that the writer has not forgotten the unsung soldiers of his trade — its booksellers — and devoted many pages, with photographs, to them. After all, Rupa’s success story, too, started with one such seller on that wonderful, bustling street in Calcutta where booklovers throng.

The reviewer is a Mumbai-based independent journalist