An unusual collaboration between indigenous Warli artists, a writer-gardener and book artisans, this book is a celebration of the miracle that is the seed and its place in our lives and cultures. Read on for an account of its evolution, and how it came to take its imaginative final shape, a combination of four book forms—each of them reflecting a particular aspect of the cosmos contained in a seed. ...

By Gita Wolf

When we first published this book, we didn’t overthink it…25 years later, its time has come again, though in a slightly altered form. So what has changed in the meantime? Quite a lot, as it turns out. ...

By Gita Wolf and Joëlle Jolivet

"When I came back from the hospital, I just drew a self-portrait… maybe to make sure that I was still alive? I think I drew one portrait every morning. It was very spontaneous, connected with the feeling of the day." This fantastic book was never thought of as a book, to begin with. It came together—literally—by accident....

By Anushka Ravishankar

I did not discover nonsense so much as recognise it with a shout of joy when I was almost twenty years old. What a waste of two decades! Of course, I had read nonsense as a child. I’d read the wickedly funny poems in the Alice books by Lewis Carroll and I knew some of Edward Lear’s gently silly poems and limericks. But I had no idea that nonsense was a respected literary genre. (Well, sort of respected.)...

By Gita Wolf and V. Geetha

Years later, when asked about Tara’s origins, Gita Wolf would say, “I didn’t really have a business plan, nor had I thought through all that publishing involved. As an avid child-reader fed on Anglo-Saxon books, it seemed to me that fun and adventure seemed to happen only to children in other places… and I wondered, why not right here?”...

By Anaïs Beaulieu

An embroiderer’s skill is actually revealed by the quality of the work on the reverse side of the fabric — the hidden intersection of threads and knots that hold the embroidery in place. It is not seen immediately, and yet must be impeccable. Perhaps a book works somewhat like embroidery...

By V. Geetha

For over twenty years now, we have curated exhibitions to do with our books and publishing. Some of these have focused on individual titles, others on our book-making, and yet others on broad themes that define our intertwined publishing concerns — to do with content, form and printing. As we worked on Painting Everything in the World, we pondered over these other exhibitions. What, we asked ourselves, is the relationship between curation and publishing?...

By Gita Wolf

The connection of skill and labour to art making has always interested us. We’re curious not only about the aesthetic and philosophical aspects of traditional art, but equally in its connection to artisanal practices, the craft that goes into giving it a physical form. In the case of Mata-Ni-Pachedi, this involves painting, block-printing and dyeing techniques which are painstaking, requiring skill and experience. This kind of artisanal knowledge is profound and priceless, but it is not valued highly, and seen more as a sequence of repetitive tasks learned through apprenticeship. Instead of holding artisanal practices against the mirror of industrial manufacture — or seeing them as distinct from art-making — we’d like to connect them intrinsically to the creative process....

By Gita Wolf and Catriona Maciver

It was a sensory experience, to say the least, to rummage through dusty drawers full of metal and wooden type faces in all shapes and sizes. Sadly, most of the sets were incomplete – since Tara had bought the press second hand, and the type was thrown in – so we found ourselves hunting down characters to form words, as though we were putting together a puzzle....