![]() As a rule, I always sign with a green pen since green is a symbol of hope, and Gifted is about hope. “Exhilarating and exhausting, but also a humbling experience. Now that this collector of autographed books finds himself on the other side of the table-as author and not audience- where he’s not asking for an autograph but being asked for one, I was curious to know what that experience had been like, having to sign book after book. It is a mosaic of moving stories of the differently abled in India (currently, Ferose is working on a book about leadership to be called Defining Moments). In 2014, he turned author himself, co-writing with Sudha Menon the book Gifted: Inspiring Stories Of People With Disabilities. Whatever the case, it is all rather sad." If someone had to give away an inscribed book, it would mean either the person did not value it any more or had to give it away for some reason or the book has outlived the person. “I feel every inscribed book has a personal story behind it. I assumed this was for the usual reason-the antiquarian market’s preference for flat-signed copies-but it turned out to be for the most human of reasons. Interestingly, though, when acquiring a signed copy to add to his collection, he prefers books that are flat-signed by authors to inscribed copies. His yearning for signed books is also a yearning for letting the people he admires touch his life. The adventure for Ferose, I realized, is really about the people. His desire to own priceless signed material is only half for the aura of a bespoke, legendary signature: the real passion is for the person, for what the signature stands for-the work and accomplishment of these people he admires so much. His other passion is collecting cricket bats signed by cricketing legends, with many in the collection being miniature bats, a collectable in its own right, signed or otherwise. ![]() Not the garden variety leather-bound deluxe editions but artistically printed books with handsome bindings, making Ferose perhaps the first Indian collector to put together a collection of finely printed books. His collecting focus ranges from signed presidential material to out-of-print cricket classics to finely printed limited editions. Salinger, Edmund Hillary, Harper Lee, Charlie Chaplin, R.K. Kennedy, Don Bradman, Jack Hobbs, Mikhail Gorbachev, Franklin. Signed material in his collection include books or letters autographed by Ernest Hemingway, Jawaharlal Nehru, J. Not long after I had an email from him saying he had just snagged a signed Gandhi, that most elusive (and pricey) of Indian autographed books. He already possessed a first edition of My Experiments With Truth. The last time I interviewed him he told me his “dream possession was any autographed book by Gandhi". It was the best possible birthday gift I could give her!" His ambition is to be India’s most significant book collector, and the focus and speed and resources he is putting into making that happen will soon bring him closer to fulfilling this goal. Another time in the San Francisco Bay Area, while browsing through the rare books section of an antiquarian bookstore, he spotted “a first edition of Agatha Christie’s The Thirteen Problems and immediately picked it up as my wife, Deepali, is a great fan of Christie, and her birthday was approaching.
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