Indian Cults and Folklore at the Musée du quai Branly
Admittedly, our latest handmade book SSSS…Snake Art and Allegory is unexpected, even by our own standards. It combines a dense collection of Indian snake tales and legends with abstract – very spare – art by Ianna Andreadis, a Greek artist based in Paris. It’s co-published with the Musée du quai Branly, Paris, a museum that specializes in indigenous art and artefacts from Asia, Africa, Oceania and the Americas. The museum’s India collection evokes the myths and rituals that are part of everyday belief in India, and their publishing agenda is very select, generally connected to the artefacts in the museum.
Librarians and the Future of Books
In late June, I traveled on behalf of Tara Books to Washington, D.C. for the annual American Library Association conference. In humid weather that reminded one of Chennai in March, over 25,000 librarians, educators and exhibitors gathered for a weekend of panels, presentations and publishers. This was Tara Books first year as an exhibitor; other publishers had told us it was a show we “had to be at.” Over the course of the last two years, we’ve been experimenting with attending a variety of shows in the United States, and decided we were finally ready to explore the ALA. I had no expectations, and I admittedly wondered at what kind of business success was to be found at such a convention.
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