In his preface to the third edition of Sharif Beti [The Gentle Daughter], published in 1918, its publisher Syed Mumtaz Ali gently complains that 1,000 copies of the second edition of the book took five years to sell out.
Now, we know that this is a complaint many of us still have about the sales figures of serious Urdu books; very recently, I was surprised to see the first edition of a classic collection of stories on the shelf of Sang-e-Meel’s bookstore, 40 years after it first appeared.
Ali husband of Sharif Beti’s author Syeda Muhammadi Begum also points out that this little tale, as he describes it, is about a family in the lower income bracket, and suitable for young girls who are normally fed a diet of unrealistic stories set in palaces. It’s something of a paradox, then, that Sharif Beti is now back in print in an anthology of Muhammadi Begum’s writings, published by Sang-e-Meel, that costs Rs2,200 not an easy price for the audience which the writer and publish