Catalogue data status

This site was built from the printed catalogue. That file has known defects, and this page reports them openly rather than hiding them behind a polished front end.

Why titles are held back

Around a third of the catalogue is in Hindi, typeset in a legacy font whose bytes do not survive text extraction — they come out as garbled Latin characters rather than Devanagari. These records were imported with their ISBN, year and price intact but with the title held for re-keying, so no unreadable text ever reaches a public page.

Descriptions cut off mid-sentence

Book descriptions come from the publisher’s own catalogue spreadsheet, and a large share of them were cut off at a fixed character limit before that file reached us — the text simply stops, often mid-word. Rather than inventing an ending, the site shows the partial text as-is with a visible notice, and asks the publisher (or a reader who owns the book) for the complete copy.

Where a fact is uncertain, the page says so

Conflicting years and prices are kept, not averaged. Where the catalogue printed two different values for the same title in two different subject sections, the book page carries a marker instead of a silent guess. The same applies to ISBNs that fail their check digit.