Asian Educational Services (AES) is a New Delhi

New Delhi

New Delhi is the capital city of India. It serves as the centre of the Government of India and the Government of the National Capital Territory of Delhi. New Delhi is situated within the metropolis of Delhi. It is one of the nine districts of Delhi Union Territory. The total area of the city is...

, India

India

India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...

-based publishing house that specialises in antiquarian

Antiquarian

An antiquarian or antiquary is an aficionado or student of antiquities or things of the past. More specifically, the term is used for those who study history with particular attention to ancient objects of art or science, archaeological and historic sites, or historic archives and manuscripts...

 reprints of books that were originally published between the 17th and early 20th centuries. Founded by Jagdish Lall Jetley in 1973, the selection of titles are over 1200 in number.

This firm has a very active publication programme that aims to preserve knowledge, in the form of old books, from being lost. An extensive list of about 200 travelogues

Travel literature

Travel literature is travel writing of literary value. Travel literature typically records the experiences of an author touring a place for the pleasure of travel. An individual work is sometimes called a travelogue or itinerary. Travel literature may be cross-cultural or transnational in focus, or...

 gives a vivid picture of India specifically, and Asia

Asia

Asia is the world's largest and most populous continent, located primarily in the eastern and northern hemispheres. It covers 8.7% of the Earth's total surface area and with approximately 3.879 billion people, it hosts 60% of the world's current human population...

 generally. Many of the big names in Asian exploration and in the field of history have been reprinted. W. W. Hunter, H. H. Wilson, Max Muller

Max Müller

Friedrich Max Müller , more regularly known as Max Müller, was a German philologist and Orientalist, one of the founders of the western academic field of Indian studies and the discipline of comparative religion...

, Rhys Davids

Thomas William Rhys Davids

Thomas William Rhys Davids was a British scholar of the Pāli language and founder of the Pali Text Society.-Life:...

, H. H. Risley, Edgar Thurston

Edgar Thurston

Edgar Thurston CIE was a British museologist and ethnographer working in colonial Southern India. In 1885 he was appointed to the Madras Government Museum, where he held the role of Superintendent...

, G. Forrest, G. B. Malleson, Nicholas Greenwood, William Muir

William Muir

Sir William Muir, KCSI was a Scottish Orientalist and colonial administrator.-Life:He was born at Glasgow and educated at Kilmarnock Academy, at Glasgow and Edinburgh Universities, and at Haileybury College. In 1837 he entered the Bengal Civil Service...

, Vincent A. Smith

Vincent Arthur Smith

Vincent Arthur Smith was born in 1843 in Dublin which was then part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. He was an Indologist, historian and art historian who worked in the Indian Civil Service and retired early to devote himself to his writing.His Oxford History of India, covering...

, Emerson Tennent, Wilhelm Geiger

Wilhelm Geiger

Wilhelm Ludwig Geiger was a German Orientalist, in the fields of Indian and Iranian languages. He was known as a specialist in Pali, Sinhala language and the Dhivehi language of the Maldives.-Life:...

, Monier-Willams, Sven Hedin

Sven Hedin

Sven Anders Hedin KNO1kl RVO was a Swedish geographer, topographer, explorer, photographer, and travel writer, as well as an illustrator of his own works...

, Richard F. Burton

Richard Francis Burton

Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton KCMG FRGS was a British geographer, explorer, translator, writer, soldier, orientalist, cartographer, ethnologist, spy, linguist, poet, fencer and diplomat. He was known for his travels and explorations within Asia, Africa and the Americas as well as his...

, Francis Younghusband

Francis Younghusband

Lieutenant Colonel Sir Francis Edward Younghusband, KCSI, KCIE was a British Army officer, explorer, and spiritual writer...

, William Moorcroft

William Moorcroft (explorer)

William Moorcroft , English explorer, was born in Ormskirk, Lancashire, the illegitimate son of Ann Moorcroft, daughter of a local farmer...

, M. Auriel Stein, Marco Polo

Marco Polo

Marco Polo was a Venetian merchant traveler from the Venetian Republic whose travels are recorded in Il Milione, a book which did much to introduce Europeans to Central Asia and China. He learned about trading whilst his father and uncle, Niccolò and Maffeo, travelled through Asia and apparently...

, Heuin Tsang, Al-Beruni

Al-Biruni

Abū al-Rayḥān Muḥammad ibn Aḥmad al-BīrūnīArabic spelling. . The intermediate form Abū Rayḥān al-Bīrūnī is often used in academic literature...

, William of Rubruck

William of Rubruck

William of Rubruck was a Flemish Franciscan missionary and explorer. His account is one of the masterpieces of medieval geographical literature comparable to that of Marco Polo....

, and many more share this shelf space. Travelogues of people who, in the Middle Ages

Middle Ages

The Middle Ages is a periodization of European history from the 5th century to the 15th century. The Middle Ages follows the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 and precedes the Early Modern Era. It is the middle period of a three-period division of Western history: Classic, Medieval and Modern...

, frequented India such as F. Bernier, J. B. Tavernier, John Fryer

John Fryer

Captain John Fryer RN was the sailing master on the HMAV Bounty, a British vessel made famous by the Mutiny on the Bounty....

, N. Mannuchi, Abbe Carre, J. Ovington, Alexander Hamilton

Alexander Hamilton

Alexander Hamilton was a Founding Father, soldier, economist, political philosopher, one of America's first constitutional lawyers and the first United States Secretary of the Treasury...

, J. Neuihoff, P. Baldeaus, Father Monsarrate, Ippolito Desideri

Ippolito Desideri

Ippolito Desideri was an Italian Jesuit missionary in Tibet and the first European to have successfully studied and understood Tibetan language and culture.-Biography:...

, etc., have been given a new lease on life.

Language aids for over 40 Asian

Languages of Asia

There is a wide variety of languages spoken throughout Asia, comprising a number of families and some unrelated isolates. Many languages have a long tradition of writing.-Central and North Asian languages:*Turkic**Azeri**Kazak**Kyrgyz**Tatar**Turkish...

, Europe

Europe

Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...

an and African languages in the form of dictionaries (classical, and popular), Polyglot

Multilingualism

Multilingualism is the act of using, or promoting the use of, multiple languages, either by an individual speaker or by a community of speakers. Multilingual speakers outnumber monolingual speakers in the world's population. Multilingualism is becoming a social phenomenon governed by the needs of...

s, grammar aids, and self-taught

Autodidacticism

Autodidacticism is self-education or self-directed learning. In a sense, autodidacticism is "learning on your own" or "by yourself", and an autodidact is a person who teaches him or herself something. The term has its roots in the Ancient Greek words αὐτός and διδακτικός...

 series are part of the AES programme for language studies. All major languages of the Indian sub-continent

South Asia

South Asia, also known as Southern Asia, is the southern region of the Asian continent, which comprises the sub-Himalayan countries and, for some authorities , also includes the adjoining countries to the west and the east...

 have been covered, along with semitic languages

Semitic languages

The Semitic languages are a group of related languages whose living representatives are spoken by more than 270 million people across much of the Middle East, North Africa and the Horn of Africa...

 like Amharic and the Arabic-Persian family of languages

Language family

A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ancestor, called the proto-language of that family. The term 'family' comes from the tree model of language origination in historical linguistics, which makes use of a metaphor comparing languages to people in a...

.

Apart from India, other areas of publication activity involve: Sri Lanka

Sri Lanka

Sri Lanka, officially the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka is a country off the southern coast of the Indian subcontinent. Known until 1972 as Ceylon , Sri Lanka is an island surrounded by the Indian Ocean, the Gulf of Mannar and the Palk Strait, and lies in the vicinity of India and the...

, Nepal

Nepal

Nepal , officially the Federal Democratic Republic of Nepal, is a landlocked sovereign state located in South Asia. It is located in the Himalayas and bordered to the north by the People's Republic of China, and to the south, east, and west by the Republic of India...

, Bhutan

Bhutan

Bhutan , officially the Kingdom of Bhutan, is a landlocked state in South Asia, located at the eastern end of the Himalayas and bordered to the south, east and west by the Republic of India and to the north by the People's Republic of China...

, Tibet

Tibet

Tibet is a plateau region in Asia, north-east of the Himalayas. It is the traditional homeland of the Tibetan people as well as some other ethnic groups such as Monpas, Qiang, and Lhobas, and is now also inhabited by considerable numbers of Han and Hui people...

, Himalayas

Himalayas

The Himalaya Range or Himalaya Mountains Sanskrit: Devanagari: हिमालय, literally "abode of snow"), usually called the Himalayas or Himalaya for short, is a mountain range in Asia, separating the Indian subcontinent from the Tibetan Plateau...

, Central Asia

Central Asia

Central Asia is a core region of the Asian continent from the Caspian Sea in the west, China in the east, Afghanistan in the south, and Russia in the north...

, Burma/Myanmar, the Indian Ocean

Indian Ocean

The Indian Ocean is the third largest of the world's oceanic divisions, covering approximately 20% of the water on the Earth's surface. It is bounded on the north by the Indian Subcontinent and Arabian Peninsula ; on the west by eastern Africa; on the east by Indochina, the Sunda Islands, and...

. Subjects deal with: History, Customs

Customs

Customs is an authority or agency in a country responsible for collecting and safeguarding customs duties and for controlling the flow of goods including animals, transports, personal effects and hazardous items in and out of a country...

 and Manners

Manners

In sociology, manners are the unenforced standards of conduct which demonstrate that a person is proper, polite, and refined. They are like laws in that they codify or set a standard for human behavior, but they are unlike laws in that there is no formal system for punishing transgressions, the...

, Religion

Religion

Religion is a collection of cultural systems, belief systems, and worldviews that establishes symbols that relate humanity to spirituality and, sometimes, to moral values. Many religions have narratives, symbols, traditions and sacred histories that are intended to give meaning to life or to...

, Buddhism

Buddhism

Buddhism is a religion and philosophy encompassing a variety of traditions, beliefs and practices, largely based on teachings attributed to Siddhartha Gautama, commonly known as the Buddha . The Buddha lived and taught in the northeastern Indian subcontinent some time between the 6th and 4th...

, Numismatics

Numismatics

Numismatics is the study or collection of currency, including coins, tokens, paper money, and related objects. While numismatists are often characterized as students or collectors of coins, the discipline also includes the broader study of money and other payment media used to resolve debts and the...

, Anthropology

Anthropology

Anthropology is the study of humanity. It has origins in the humanities, the natural sciences, and the social sciences. The term "anthropology" is from the Greek anthrōpos , "man", understood to mean mankind or humanity, and -logia , "discourse" or "study", and was first used in 1501 by German...

, Art

Art

Art is the product or process of deliberately arranging items in a way that influences and affects one or more of the senses, emotions, and intellect....

, Architecture

Architecture

Architecture is both the process and product of planning, designing and construction. Architectural works, in the material form of buildings, are often perceived as cultural and political symbols and as works of art...

, Castes and Tribe

Tribe

A tribe, viewed historically or developmentally, consists of a social group existing before the development of, or outside of, states.Many anthropologists use the term tribal society to refer to societies organized largely on the basis of kinship, especially corporate descent groups .Some theorists...

s, The Indian Revolt/Mutiny of 1857

Indian Rebellion of 1857

The Indian Rebellion of 1857 began as a mutiny of sepoys of the British East India Company's army on 10 May 1857, in the town of Meerut, and soon escalated into other mutinies and civilian rebellions largely in the upper Gangetic plain and central India, with the major hostilities confined to...

, Natural History

Natural History

Natural history is the scientific study of plants or animals.Natural History may also refer to:In science and medicine:* Natural History , Naturalis Historia, a 1st-century work by Pliny the Elder...

, gazetteers, guidebooks, etc.

AES was awarded the National Award for Excellence in Publishing in 2005.

AES has been featured regularly in newspapers and TV shows, that highlight its re-publication programme. The newspapers that have carried stories on AES include the national dailies like The Hindu

The Hindu

The Hindu is an Indian English-language daily newspaper founded and continuously published in Chennai since 1878. According to the Audit Bureau of Circulations, it has a circulation of 1.46 million copies as of December 2009. The enterprise employed over 1,600 workers and gross income reached $40...

 and The Indian Express

The Indian Express

The Indian Express is an Indian English-language daily newspaper. It is published in Mumbai by Indian Express Group. After Ramnath Goenka's death in 1991, the group was split in 1999 among his family members into two with the southern editions taking the name The New Indian Express, while the old...

. Among the channels that have features AES are the National Channel of India (Door Darshan 1) and the CNN/IBN

CNN IBN

Cable News Network-Indian Broadcasting Network is an English-language Indian television news channel. The network is a partnership between Global Broadcast News and Turner International in India . Rajdeep Sardesai is the Editor-in-Chief of the network...

network in India.

After the death of the founder in 2005, the firm is being run by the surviving family.

External links

Relevant links to print press sites that carry an article on AES are:

• http://www.hindu.com/2006/01/03/stories/2006010305300200.htm
• http://cities.expressindia.com/fullstory.php?newsid=152144

link to the official site of Asian Educational Services: http://www.aes.ind.in