An anthology of essays of Bengal’s major writers and thinkers on the culture of reading, publishing and collecting books, with translations of two seminal essays by Schopenhauer and Derrida as points of reference, offering Bengali readers and writers an invaluable insight into what books mean and stand for. Writers are Rabindranath Tagore, Pramotho Chowdhury, Sharatchandra Chattopadhya, Sukumar Roy, Yatindranath Sengupta, Pemendra Mitra, Annadashankar Roy, Bimalaprasad Mukhopadhya, Saroj Acharya, Arun Mitra, Shashibhushan Dasgupta, Chittaranjan Bandhopadhya, Radhaprasad Gupta, Diptendrakumar Sanayal, Naresh Guha, Tarapada Mukhopadhya, Punerndu Patri, Shankho Ghosh, Shripantho, Sunil Gangopadhya, Charu Khan, Alok Roy, Samik Bandopadhya, Swapan Chakravorty, Arthur Schopenhauer and Jacques Derrida.