The Painter of Signs (1976) 2

"His room was without table or chair. He had a mat and a roll of bedding; when he wished to sleep, he unrolled the bed, but when he wanted to read, he sat reclining on the rolled-up bed, lost in the pages of some ancient volume ... He knew a second-hand bookseller at the market who gathered books from far and wide. Raman's great delight was to pick up a bargain at the antiquarian shop. He wrote the bookseller's sign-board for him and burnished it anew from time to time, and picked up a book or two instead of presenting a bill ... The patterns and designs that book-worms created on the book-covers and inside made him ecstatic. He spent his hours studying them and discussing them with Raman. 'Book-worms possess a strange sense of design,' he would explain. 'Some books are tunnelled end to end, some they give up with the preface, in some they create a perfect wizardry of design but confined to the end papers, never an inch beyond. A real masterpiece must be read only in an ancient edition ....'" (17)