Remembrance

So’ham Books began as the dream of a family steeped in literature. The late Dr Jitendra Vashishtha founded it in the year 2000 to publish serious literature to a standard of production that it deserved; his son, Samartha Vashishtha, served as its honorary founding co-editor. Operating out of the small north Indian city of Ambala, Dr Vashishtha would make many trips in rickety buses to the capital, New Delhi, where a small printing press would typeset and print the books over several months. Proofs were obsessively hand-corrected to ensure that no printer’s gremlins crept in. The acceptance rate for manuscripts was low, and anything that fell below the bar was promptly rejected. The press continued until it ceased operations in or about the year 2009.

Poonam Vashishtha, Samartha’s mother, kept an eye on everything, especially operations and finance, and often had a lot of editorial input into the books themselves.