Seagull Books
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Seagull Books is a small press begun by Navin Kishore, operating in Kolkata (formerly Calcutta) that specialises in books on theatre and film, and translations. It is particularly known for the series of translations of Mahasweta Devi's books by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak that it publishes. It is owned and run by the Seagull Foundation for the Arts. The Seagull Media and Resource Centre is a sister concern.
[edit] History
Navin Kishore set up Seagull Books in 1982 in order to provide a platform from which books about the arts could be published. He designed most of the early titles and the publisher's publicity material and catalogues, and his signature style of innovative layout ideas with a liberal use of photographs was quickly recognised as distinctive. In 1987 the Seagull Foundation for the Arts was created with foreign funding so that Seagull could also provide resources to researchers and artists. Its objectives were to promote the performing arts (parallel cinema and theatre), the visual arts, both traditional and contemporary, to document and preserve cultural activity, to publish books and a theatre journal, arrange forums and seminars and exhibit good design. The publisher's office is on Circus Avenue, and the bookshop was set up in Bhawanipur in Calcutta in the late 1990s, with advice from the proprietor of the Foreign Book Depot.
[edit] Activities
The Seagull Foundation is presently run by a board of trustees which indcludes K.G. Subramanyam, Samik Bandyopadhyay, and Mrinal Sen. Seagull Books is probably the largest English language publisher based in Kolkata and stocks about 20,000 titles. Its bookstore was the second western-format browsable bookstore in Kolkata (after the Oxford Bookstore on Park Street), before the coming of the Crossword and Landmark book chains to the city.
Seagull Books also publishes the Seagull Theatre Quarterly.
The Seagull Books pavilion is usually one of the largest in the Kolkata Book Fair, but in 2007 when the fair fell foul of court orders requiring it to shift its venue away from the Kolkata Maidan, Seagull Books pulled out of the Fair in protest against the failure of the authorities to make alternative arrangements.
[edit] Resources
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