The whole DJ Keymer group is gone, says Sandip Ray over the phone from Kolkata, about his father’s time at the British advertising agency where he started out in 1943 as a junior visualiser. Satyajit Ray also worked as a book cover designer and illustrator with the publishing house Signet Press, established by DK Gupta, which published Jawaharlal Nehru’s Discovery of India and Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay’s Pather Panchali. It was while working on illustrations for an abridged version of the latter that he saw its cinematic quality and years later, in 1955, would transform his many sketches into scenes of his first film. 

“His main thrust in his early 20s was visuals,” says author Indrani Majumdar, who is behind the English translation of Ray’s Professor Shonku stories about the adventures of a globe-trotting scientist. In fact, Another Dozen Stories, a translation of yet another collection of Ray’s tales for younger fans, and with an introduction by Sharmila Tagore, is being released by Puffin today. “He revolutionised the whole concept of Indian design because he brought in a lot of Indian elements to suit the subject of a book,” she says.