Mrs Reiver virtually grew up in the public libraries of Manchester and so the complete lack of lending libraries in Bangalore has come as a big shock to the system. The compensation for this is that books are relatively cheap here – although that is often reflected in the printing standards – I had to prise apart my copy of (modern classic???) The Alchemist page by page – and wished I hadn’t bothered – new age twaddle of the worst sort. Anyway –in an effort to recreate a familiar atmosphere I decided to sort out the books in our library.
Stage 1 was the planar random tessillation by functional category approach as illustrated, but once I got past this we ended up with 15 sections as listed below. What can we learn from this ?
Category No
Literature 78
Popular Fiction 64
German 52
Cooking 50
Sci Fi/Fantasy 49
Business 47
Reference 45
Chick Lit 32
Popular Science, Philosophy, Economics 32
Poetry 31
India 29
Humour 28
Travel Guides 28
Childrens 26
History - Biography 20
Total 611
Despite the large number of cookbooks I will still insist in doing off piste cooking?
We love Hamburg - 9 of the guides were for there
Or more practically there are perhaps some new publishing niches which could potentially get cross segment appeal.
The german cookbook based on the adventures travel writer who was kidnapped by aliens and travelled in time (working title ‘A Brief History of Currywurst’) perhaps.
A travel guide to India delivered entirely in limericks, example:
There was a young man from Bombay
Who tried to explain he was gay
The Babus got flustered
Indignance was mustered
Forms stamped said impossible today
Or a combination of wild fantasy with business finance – oops I think real life has usurped fiction there!
And what is currently top of our local best seller list – it is the phenomenal publishing sensation that is ‘The Karnataka Shops and Commercial Establishments Act (1961) & Rules (1963) – with Notifications and Caselaws’ a real page turner – no further evidence is needed that one has to make ones own entertainment here.
2 comments:
Always tricky to expose your reading material - a clear window to the soul. My appraisal - no maternity books - well done. But no war books? Are you a hurmur?
Hurmur is beyond my meagre experience - the window is probably rather more into Mrs Reivers soul than mine as I leaked quite a lot library wise over the life transitions of the last few years. You must explain the fascination of WW1 to me sometime over a gallon or two - we never had that conversation
Post a Comment