The Literary Mirror

Dastur turns from fiction to reportage for this history of independent Indian publishing since the 1970s, tracking a handful of small presses through founder interviews, surviving catalogues, and — where nothing else survives — secondhand memory.

The book is candid about its own limits: entire presses appear only as a paragraph, because that is all the surviving record allows, and Dastur resists the temptation to pad these entries with speculation. That honesty is rare in publishing histories and worth noting on its own.

Where the book shines is in its chapter on distribution — how books actually reached readers outside the metros before the internet did it for them — a subject usually skipped entirely in favour of author gossip. A Partial History of Small Presses is a reference book more than a read-through, and none the worse for it.

“Dastur's history is honest about its gaps in a way most publishing histories are not.”