Remembrance

So’ham Books began as the dream of a family steeped in literature. The late Dr Jitendra Vashishtha and his son, Samartha Vashishtha, started it in the year 2000 to publish serious literature to a standard of production that it deserved. 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 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.

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