Heritage bookseller and publisher Dasgupta has started imparting training to youths interested in the publishing industry.

This is for the first time when such a venture has been taken by a publishing house in Kolkata. Dasgupta and Company was set up in 1886 and it has been given heritage status. The book store, opposite the Presidency University, on College Street is a part of Kolkata’s history and heritage.

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Different colleges have collaborated with Dasgupta to start the course titled publishing and book management course. The duration of the course is 60 hours and it has come up at the Asutosh Memorial Institute. Dasgupta has recently opened an outlet at the ancestral house of Sir Asutosh Mookerjee in south Kolkata.

Mr Arabinda Dasgupta, managing director of Dasgupta and Company said undergraduate and postgraduate students can enrol for the course. Dasgupta is signing MoU with different colleges to impart vocational training to the students.

The students are given training on production of books along with book binding, book keeping, cover designing and cataloguing.

Mr Dasgupta said the students are given talks on the Copyright Act. “Plagiarism has become rampant these days. Recently, a foreign lady came to our book store and asked for books on Tagore. She has done PhD on Tagore. She saw the encyclopaedia on Tagore and told me that a publishing house has printed her PhD thesis verbatim without taking her permission. Many students have joined the publishing industry and so it is necessary for them to know the Copyright Act,” he said.

The students were taken to Baithakkhana area which is famous for book binding. Cover design is another important area and experts on these areas have taken classes, Mr Dasgupta said.