Just when I had begun to give up on ever finding a collector and a collection of seminal importance so far as rare and early printed books in India are concerned, I stumble on Richard Kossow. He lives in London and has spent the last 45 years pursuing and assembling the most astounding collection of not just the scarcest Indian imprints but also books of typographical interest, many of them in finely crafted bindings.
Several books in his collection took even the illustrious book historian, Graham Shaw, by surprise; he made a trip to Kossow’s library just to see for himself that such Indian editions actually existed, and having inspected the collection, turned to the collector and declared he had seen nothing like it in his many years of concentrating on books about India.
Chance discovery
I emailed Richard Kossow to find out why an Englishman had become so smitten with books printed between the 18th and 19th centuries in India, devoting nearly 50 years of his collecting life to gathering them. Kossow wrote back immediately to say he was still collecting rare Indian imprints assiduously, and that along with Shaw he is presently working on a catalogue of his Indian collection. I had despaired of ever finding a collector whose taste, energy, passion and resources would be directed towards antiquarian Indian imprints since I knew the difficulty of sourcing these editions.
There are no specialist dealers in the field, there are no catalogues or bibliographies that can inform your search. How, then, had Kossow pulled it off?
I asked him eagerly about his ‘Indiana’ journey, which is a useful if cute name for early printed Indian books and pamphlets of historical and bibliographical significance that have become scarce and valuable today.
“It all began,” Kossow told me, “in the early 1970s when I used to travel to Europe often on business, where I usually managed to spend a few joyous hours in the rare-book shops of whatever city I was visiting. On one occasion I happened to be in Paris, where I met up with a young English bookseller. He introduced me to a friend who sold academic books in large quantities to institutions. At the time I was collecting early travel accounts of journeys in Central Asia, and asked if he had anything on the subject. ‘No,’ he replied, ‘the closest thing to Central Asia that I have is this’ — and he produced this extraordinary piece of Vepery printing from 1779 in a contemporary binding, entitled A Malabar and English Dictionary, wherein the words... of the Tamulian Language... are Explained in English. Just the appearance of the title page, with its Tamil typography and early European design, mesmerised me.”
“I couldn’t take my eyes off the book or stop riffling its crisp pages full of Tamil words and English translations. For the equivalent of £55 it was mine, and I couldn’t have imagined what a journey of exploration this one book was destined to take me on for the rest of my life.” What Kossow told me next once again underscored what I had suspected: that the quest for early printed Indian books had proved difficult and elusive. It was a tale of years of hard searching, weekly and sometimes daily trolling through booksellers’ catalogues, visits to rare book shops far and wide, and continuous reading of auction catalogues from all parts of the world.
Printed beauty
“That I can boast of an Indian library,” he remarked, “that stands out from its peers for its breadth, interest, rarity, provenance and condition is simply a matter of consistent application over a very long period of time.” He kept his focus on books printed from 1778 to 1858 in India, and what astonished, delighted and impelled him to dive deeper into gathering them is their careful craftmanship.
“Think about all those manuscripts that were magnificently bound for important Indian clients throughout the Mughal period. Those same craftsmen adapted themselves during the East India Company’s period to bindings for European-style printed books. The catalogue I’m now developing will illustrate the quality and variety of information and printed beauty which once made India the apogee of the printed book in Asia.”
What a debt of gratitude we owe Kossow for assembling this glittering ‘Indiana’ collection — one can always find collectors with a scattering of early printed Indian books in their library, but no one, not even Glenn Horowitz, the other Indiana collector — has done it with such sharp focus, abiding interest and steely devotion. And in his London library these Indian rarities, that might otherwise have perished or simply gotten lost over time, have found a worthy home.
The writer is a bibliophile, columnist and critic.
