Daryaganj Book Bazaar, Delhi, India (photo by Sonal Khullar, all images courtesy University of Washington Press) Years ago, a friend bequeathed her collection of stamp albums to my sister and me. At the time, I tucked them away neatly in a box. While reading Old Stacks New Leaves: The Arts of The Book in South Asia (University of Washington Press, 2023), I came across an image from a stamp album owned by Deep Krishna Mehrotra, father of Indian poet Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, from 1931. Immediately, I fished out my box to observe, count, and categorize the stamps. There were at least 2,000 of these with impressive images, collected from 44 countries. I confess I would have continued to ignore them had it not been for this exciting new publication. Old Stacks New Leaves is a distinctive and scholarly study wherein editor Sonal Khullar reconsiders genealogies, text-image relationships, and the […]

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