25¢ a Cup

With 100 exquisite photos, 25¢ a Cup is a beautifully illustrated travel-memoir. As a photographer, Brian Thomas captures Calcutta’s barefoot rickshaw pullers hauling plump and sandaled shoppers for his portfolio and families surviving its slums for NGOs helping the city’s poor. As a writer, he composes ghost stories set in the British Raj and finds in Durga Puja, a city-wide all-night street party, a fusion of art, religion, and community he’d never imagined.


25¢ a Cup features a unique quest. It puts the reader in the streets of Calcutta in a search for the real India and a new Paris – that city of art so loved by Hemingway, Henry Miller, and Picasso. As Emily-Jane Orford of Readers’ Favorite put it:


"Paris of the 1920s, complete with its bohemians and artists, may no longer exist – at least, not in Paris. But, perhaps this ideal image of Paris does exist in another part of the world like Calcutta. Brian Thomas ventured to India in search... What he found was worth much more. ... This is a fascinating read, very thought-provoking and poignant."


Like his earlier work, the legendary If Monks had Macs… virtual monastery library, 25¢ a Cup is a wild mix of art, ideas, and adventure.