Aditya Behl on the Clay Sanskrit Library

[isabelle onians]

Dear Colleagues,

The TLS review of the CSL is available on the press page of our CSL website:
http://www.claysanskritlibrary.org/press.php.

Aditya Behl's piece (
http://www.claysanskritlibrary.org/press/CSL_TLSReview_200906.php) does not
actually say that the series is being discontinued because of poor sales,
although one can see how that inference might have been drawn from his
adjacent mention of the quarrel between Lakshmi and Sarasvati.

The series has indeed now been closed down, as of June 30 just gone,
although we are still sending a last clutch of new titles to press to appear
on bookshelves in September (
http://www.claysanskritlibrary.org/volumes.php?show=12).

The final list will comprise 56 volumes:
http://www.claysanskritlibrary.org/volumes_current.php.

Yours truly,

Isabelle
(Onians)



On Fri, Jul 3, 2009 at 2:22 AM, George Thompson <gthomgt at comcast.net> wrote:

> I would like to call the attention of list members to a recent review
> article by Aditya Behl which discusses this recent enterprise which aims to
> present much of classical Sanskrit literature in a format similar to
> Harvard's Loeb classical library of Greek and Latin classics.  I refer to
> the Times Literary Supplement issue June 19 2009, no. 5542.  This is the
> print version, a very prominent front page review.  I do not know whether it
> is available online.
>
> However, I can say that Behl has done a nice job of introducing the Clay
> Sanskrit Library to a general audience.  Unfortunately, this article also
> gives the disturbing news that this series of classical Sanskrit texts
> presented attractively and accessibly in a bilingual format, with the
> Sanskrit text [in simplified sandhi-analyzed form] facing an English
> translation on opposite page, just as in the Harvard Loeb series, is about
> to be discontinued because of poor sales.
> We should all encourage our students to buy Clay editions of these Sanskrit
> texts.  And we all should buy them as well, as much as we can.  This is a
> very valuable series which we should all support, in spite of its very minor
>  flaws.
> George Thompson
>