Six Seasons: A Picture Book of the Indian Year

Details

Our own book, published under the Shuunnya Leaf imprint, taking a child through the six ritus of the Indian year: Vasanta, Grishma, Varsha, Sharad, Hemanta and Shishira, one spread each with the food, the weather and the work that belongs to it. Written and illustrated in house. The writer and the illustrator are named on the title page and we print no biography for either, because a picture book stands or falls on its pages and an inflated credential is the cheapest thing in publishing to manufacture. Three things are routinely cheated in an Indian children's book and all three are checkable. Page count is padded by counting endpapers and the half title, so a book sold as 48 pages has 40 pages of actual book. Hardbound is used for a board cover glued onto a perfect-bound block, which is not a hardback and sheds a page the first time a four-year-old flattens it. And the cover lamination is never named, because naming it means writing the word plastic on a book that is being sold as gentle.

• 48 pages, which is 24 leaves and 48 printed sides, counted on a sample from every lot. The two endpapers are not counted as pages and never will be
• Three sewn signatures of 16 pages each, thread sewn through the fold, then case bound onto 2.5 mm greyboard
• It opens flat at any spread, because a sewn book does, and a child reads with the book on the floor
• Trim 250 mm by 250 mm square. Text paper 170 GSM matt coated, measured to ISO 536, so the colour sits where it was printed
• Paper is acid free to ISO 9706 and elemental chlorine free, AOX under 0.2 kg per tonne of pulp. ECF is not chlorine free and we are not going to round it up, which is the same line the tissue listings on this store take
• The cover is matt BOPP laminated. That is a plastic film. A child's book without it is finished in a month, so we use it and print the word rather than a leaf
• No ISBN yet. This is the imprint's first list and the block has been applied for. When a number is issued it goes on the reprint and on this page. We will not print one that resolves to nothing
• Printed and bound in Sivakasi, Tamil Nadu
• The bilingual edition is Rs 50 more for a shorter print run, not for extra pages. It has the same 48