Speaker Andrew Stewart's delectable insights into Mumbai, author Ian Cochrane's reading and telling of production tales, the scrumptious catering, the stylish venue with its warm and professional staff – perfect. Designer Jinny Coyle looked fabulous as did her cover design en masse. And my favorite host in the world, the inimitable Roger Taylor. Head count of 80, thanks to my mathematician poet friend Geoff Campbell. Photos coming, courtesy Kelly Fitzgerald and partner Lachlan.
Publisher speech
Thanks to you all for coming. I'm very excited. The most satisfying thing in publishing is holding in my hand something real, something tangible. Publishing is somewhat like writing in that you often don’t know where you’re going – but you do know when you are there. The vision shifts, evolves, and intuition takes over.
There’s been a lot of trumpeting about the death of the print book and of bookshops. Yet here we are launching a print book in one of Melbourne’s most thriving bookshops. E-books are here to stay and Wordy-Gurdy has plans for them, but Indian Summers was always meant to be in print. Indian Summers was always meant to feel good as well as look good. Something that reads easily, that you can flip through, mark the pages with the cover flaps, pore over photographs and slip into a bag or a pocket to read on the road. You need to know where you are – both with maps and page markers. But the text has to be worthy of it. I think it is.
We're proud to publish Indian Summers as our first book. And we couldn’t have found a better author than Ian Cochrane. The great writer and editor Arthur Plotnik said:
You write to communicate to the hearts and minds of others what’s burning inside you. And we edit to let the fire show through the smoke.Ian and I began playing with fire as author and editor in 2009. He had a mountain of writing on the go including these India stories and we pushed them, pulled them, lengthened and shortened them, as he considered various modes of publication. Now the fire was showing, the smoking was blowing away and they began to be distinctly shaped like a book. When you’re messing round with fire, you need to build two things with fellow players – trust and respect. And to that, add industriousness. Writing is hard work and Ian’s the hardest working writer I know. He really looks, he really listens, and he redrafts till it’s right.
This is where our designer, Jinny Coyle from Flux Design Studio, comes in. (Yes, we are related!) Jinny has been seduced by print too. From my vague brief she came up with a design that integrated colours, text and photographs and an elegant solution to the many captions. She added a henna overlay to the cover and repeated the motif throughout. This book is living proof that the whole is more than the sum of the parts.
We’d imagined the book with a photograph bookending each story. But some stories ended up with plenty, others none, so Ian called on other photographers to fill the gaps. They kept growing until we had a hundred images. So I call this a pocket-sized coffee-table book. Jinny placed the photos so they worked together, both as collages and relevance to text. It’s printed in Australia using the offset process rather than the cheaper and less effective digital printing so we could retain the luminous quality of the photographs.
Indian Summers was reviewed in the last Weekend Australian by travel guru Susan Kurosawa:
The style is observational and anecdotal, his vignettes illuminated by the assorted zany characters he meets. Anyone who has ventured alone around India, with an open mind and a sense of humour, will find resonance in Cochrane’s adventures.But I’ll add to that with a quote by writer and artist Robert Hollingworth:
I’ve never been there, but Ian Cochrane took me on an evocative journey as rewarding as the real thing – more so, since no tourist in India could gain the kind of personal insight intimately portrayed within these covers. A testament to the power of good books.
Indian Summers isn’t just about a trip to India. It encapsulates a lifetime of encounters with the country. Ian has woven time and place together and added context, both from history and India’s greatest writers. It reminds me of a glorious Indian embroidery.Huge thanks to Gail McManus Graphics – for all Wordy-Gurdy logos. Thanks also to Chris Redfern and staff at Avenue Bookstore, Misuzu for food and Randall’s for vino.
