I have been living in a different world for the past two weeks. Days have rushed by with a blur; writers, poets, graphic artists, independent publishers and book designers seem to be spilling onto the Jude campus, the one site where book-creators and –lovers congregate, in the absence of an official annual book fair, courtesy the state government’s indecision in appointing a permanent fair ground. So the campus has ‘literally’ been teeming with academics like John Kerrigan and Jaqueline Rose, writers like Maggie Ferguson and Kunal Basu, independent publishers from Argentina etc, book designers aka Trinankur Banerjee and Pinaki De, and film makers like Anurag Kashyap (Remember No Smoking?). Last week, Robin Robertson swooped down on us, and dazzled all in a poetry-reading session where he read a few of his poems from his latest collection called Swithering which has bagged prestigious literary awards He has worked in publishing for more than twenty years and the books which he helps produce , usually make it to the top ten bestsellers list in the UK. It was such an experience to just sit and listen to someone who has been on both sides of the fence; the side which creates the book in a fundamental sense, and the side which shapes it, moulds it and packages it as a saleable commodity to the public. I had till then, only been a part of the former; I read books, and sometimes buy them, but never had the chance to look into the book-making process as such. Most of us in fact are oblivious to the publishing process , and have little or no idea about the various considerations which go into converting a manuscript into a proper book. Things like book design, the importance of typography, the layout, the cover, chapter divisions, copyright issues, matter so much to a publisher, and affect the ultimate look of the book in numerous ways. But the buyer doesn’t think twice about them, before buying a book, even though he/she might have been attracted to it precisely because of such features, in the first place. I often think that since a publisher does his best to make the book look good, and treats it as a commodity , selling a book is really no better than selling a cake of soap. The only difference is that while there you can print Kareena Kapoor’s face on the wrapper indiscriminately without thinking about which brand it is, here you try and coordinate the subject matter and the form, because even though all soaps are essentially the same, all books are not. So if you’d have to design a cover for a book, you’d first have to know what the book is about. In that sense, book-making is a far more involved process than soap-making. The saddest part is , however, that there are more people on Earth who buy soaps than books.