Purple Peacock Books Private Limited was begun by Nicolas Klotz and Ketaki Dutt in 2004.
Nick Klotz was an Englishman settled in Australia working with a renowned printing press machines business that brought him frequently to India. He fell in love with India and decided to up his life from Australia to India and started the publishing with Ketaki Dutt. He passed away suddenly in an accident in Puducherry in 2016.
Ketaki Dutt has always been in publishing, her entire professional life was with a large publishing and distribution firm in India. In 2004 Nick and she set up this bilingual publishing firm in Kolkata, India. After Nick’s sudden demise, the private limited firm is now plain Purple Peacock Books & Arts.
Just previous to the establishment of the firm, in 2002 Bryan Forst and Ketaki Dutt launched Bharat Books & Arts, a website selling Bengali books and arts and other India specific books. This site became very popular and NRIs were happy to find Bengali language books easily especially as the posting was very reliable and there were no missing posts. Bryan is an American computer specialist who subsequently moved elsewhere. The site continued operating however till recently.
Purple Peacock Books
We publish semi academic and industrial non-fiction books in English, primarily. Historical deconstruction research works, particularly the book on Netaji has gone into fresh editions and many reprints. Tata Steel in Jamshedpur and the Tea industry in Jorhat have published well researched books with us. Wide ranging English books from the world of Industrial management have been published by us along with our very popular fiction title by a retired RAW chief.
Our Bengali books are mostly translations of neo classical and popular French titles into Bengali, supported by the French Embassy in India (Tagore programme).
Our translation series began with Tagore and his short stories translated into English and French rights were also sold to renowned publishers in France.
The Isha Foundation of Coimbatore was coordinated with, for the spiritual studies by Sadhguru.
We also do joint ventures in translation, such as translating the Chambers student dictionary into Bengali.
Recently we have begun documentaries on book promotion and now we do regular documentary films.
We also run a website that replaces bharatbooks.com with purplepeacockbooks.com which features our own books and films and calls for creative writing ideas but we aim to include Bengali books published by others as well as sell the rare prints of paintings from old Bengali books.
Our next project is audio books. We aim to create audio books mostly for the children of NRIs and others who live elsewhere.