Pradeep Sebastian > Quotes

“It was Coleridge, a compulsive book scribbler, who first called it marginalia. Lamb would lend books to Coleridge, and they would come back annotated. Rather than being upset with his friend, Lamb valued such personal jottings. Other well documented marginalists include William Blake, Conan Doyle, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, Northrop Frye and Vladimir Nabokov.”
― Pradeep Sebastian, The Groaning Shelf

“One of the (uncontemplated) pleasures of childhood and adolescence was how rigorously we exchanged comics and books with our buddies. As adults we seem to have lost that joy. As children we were eager to swap comics with schoolmates; in college we freely lent books to each other. There was always a favourite writer or book we were urging our classmates to read.”
― Pradeep Sebastian, The Groaning Shelf

“My earliest memory of imaginative and intellectual pleasure (though I didn’t know that then) as a child was the ritual walk I took every day to my local library to exchange my comics. All day I looked forward to coming back from school, kicking off my shoes, chucking the uniform for something comfortable, slipping into chappals, snacking on something hurriedly, and then waiting impatiently for the library doors to open. And then would come the best part: returning the previous day’s comic (which by now I would have read several times) and browsing for a new one. On my small deposit, I could borrow only one.”
― Pradeep Sebastian, The Groaning Shelf

“Eric Waschke, a bookseller obsessed with far-flung bookshops – he’s visited three thousand bookstores across 53 countries, an odyssey to explore ‘the known book world’ through bookstore visits at every stop – is one among several other remarkable book people and places that turn up here.”
― Pradeep Sebastian, The Groaning Shelf

“We learn that the lowly footnote is not really a lowly paratext in Anthony Grafton’s The Footnote; A Curious History and Chuck Zerby’s The Devil’s Details: A History of Footnotes.”
― Pradeep Sebastian, The Groaning Shelf

“The first book to use the term ‘science fiction’ in the title was also a vintage paperback, an anthology called The Pocket Book of Science Fiction edited by Donald A. Wollheim (Pocket Book no. 214) from 1943.”
― Pradeep Sebastian, The Groaning Shelf