Abhijit Gupta is one of the leading practitioners of book history in twenty-first century India. He looks back at the work done in the past twenty years and considers the challenges ahead in a conversation with Murali Ranganathan When did you realise that you had evolved into a book historian from a professor of English literature? How did the evolution happen? It happened the other way around. I started teaching in an English department in 1999 and prior to that I had completed a PhD during 1994-96 on the publishing histories of some women novelists in late 19th-century England. But when I started my doctoral research in 1994, I was not even aware that a discipline called book history existed. So you could say that this was a classic instance of speaking prose without knowing it.