Later, when I was seven or eight, came The Arabian Nights, Hans Andersen and the Grimm brothers, anthologies of Victorian ghost stories and tales of terror, illustrated with threatening, Beardsley-like drawings that projected an inner world as weird as the surrealists'.
There were anthologies of poetry, a collection of impressionist pictures, many books of memoirs and histories of the first world war.
The sonnet that grew out of it was included in Palgrave's Golden Treasury in 1861 and, since then, has made most anthologies of English verse.
Over the past decade they have issued dozens more anthologies and other works.Technology Quarterly Picture imperfect Coach potatoes Fool's platinum?
Some of his poems are now in anthologies.
E-books routinely pop up on file-sharing websites like the Pirate Bay, both in their own right and as part of vast anthologies with names like "2,500 Retail Quality E-books".
"Storytelling started as oral history," says Adam Smith, the boss of Google's book project, so a partial reversion to that form, through podcasting, would be natural.But even anthologies of short stories and poems, like longer novels, are unlikely to disappear.
Anthologies list only a few bilious lines from a bad poem about the bourgeoisie and a quotation from his entry in "Who's Who", in which he claimed to have been educated "in the holidays from Eton".
Edith published her first book of poems, edited the ground-breaking "Wheels" anthologies of poetry, and started the weekly gatherings that for many years attracted the great artists, musicians and writers of the day.
The 16 chapters range from an appreciation of Rabindranath Tagore, a great poet of Mr Sen's native Bengal, to an examination of the historic intellectual links between India and China, to a discussion of India's wealth of sophisticated calendars.Mr Sen has done more than most authors of such anthologies to turn this into a coherent book rather than a random miscellany.
This is, of course, a problem that faces many anthologies.
