Many are the aspirant authors who after the sweat and grit of writing, taste the salt of tears. Their rainbow is elusive; they cannot dip into the pot of gold simply because it’s at the far end of the rainbow. They lack money to pay for the publication of their labour – of love albeit - and publishers usually deal with new authors as if they, the publishers, have the proverbial barge pole in hand. If you’ve made a name for yourself, then you are fine - you are published. But to make a name you have to be published and thus the vicious circle unless, as said before, you can finance yourself or you get short-listed for the Gratiaen Award. Some publishers accept your mss, keep it for long and then return it as unpublishable. But if you have a hundred thousand and more to spare, then your mss is worth publication and is accepted!

Take heart, however, those who have locked their manuscripts back in their drawers or replaced the scribbled papers under the mattress. There is hope! A publisher with the sensibility to realize the trauma suffered by unpublished authors, gives help. He will publish your manuscript if he judges it is worth publishing. His standards are reachable.

The man who can help would-be authors and who has graciously helped many to see their work in print without paying anything up front is Sirisumana Godage of Godage Publishers (Pvt) Ltd, Maradana. Benign, silver haired, kind faced; he finds time in his busy schedule to meet all who come to see him. Here is the publisher with heart to whom many owe their publications. He will see your mss; make a judgement - most often in your favour; and offer to publish the book with no cost to you. He takes on the cost and then recovers it – all or part – from sales of the said publication. He will give the author a royalty payment of 10%. If one were to want to try selling one’s publication or to transfer the books to a sales point, one buys books off Godage Bookshop at 40% discount. Very fair since the seller of your books deducts around 30% of the selling price of the book for his services.

The National Library and Documentation Services Board (NL&DSB) has re-started its assistance to authors through their Publications Division whereby mss submitted by potential authors are vetted and passed for publication or rejected. They pay a comparatively paltry amount to the publisher of your choice - pricing a book of short stories in English running to around 175 pages, for example, at Rs 160.00 per copy. And here’s where Sirisumana Godage comes in. He accepts the mss for publication and goes ahead with the publishing of the book without charging the author a cent, assured as he is of the NL buying some copies. But he is sticking his neck out - the book may be a shelf-sitter, strictly the opposite of a bestseller. Godage takes the risk on your behalf and I for one adduce it to his wanting to encourage authors and empathizing with their plight.

When this was mentioned to him, he deprecatingly avoided taking praise. His reply: "I may lose on the publication of these books but this loss is compensated for by the profits I make on the sale of supplementary reading texts for schools and popular Sinhala novels."

Maybe the difficulties he encountered in his life until established in the book trade, and that would have been in his middle years, creates empathy in this man. He is an entrepreneur but he combines business acumen with a strong streak of benign understanding and generous kindness.

He was the sixth in a family of eleven siblings born to a tenant farmer in Palatuwa, in the Matara District. He studied in the village school and soon after his secondary education, along with a couple of other adventurous youth, left home with no notice and moved north to Colombo to find employment. The 15-year-old Sirisumana stopped off at Kalutara and found employment in a tea boutique. He lasted only one month with homesickness overtaking him. He returned to his village but soon enough repeated his absconding, this time to Colombo to work in the aquarium named Lumbini. He loved the fish he cared for but a visit to an uncle in Piliyandala brought him to the notice of a businessman in printing. He worked in a subsidiary office in Maradana casting type, necessary for movable printing of that time. The young man slowly edged towards being his own master, taking on binding of books and thus his progression to selling books and publishing them, until now he is one of the biggest book publishers in Sri Lanka.

His material achievements have been several awards for publishing and printing, two of them being the SAARC once-in-a-lifetime award for book publishing in Sri Lanka – 2004. From 1985 onwards he has won the Cultural Department’s award for the most books published within the year. In 1994 he received the Deshabandu title from President Wijetunge though his selection was by President Premadasa. These kudos sit lightly on him. During my interview with him in his modest office in the Godage Book Emporium in Maradana, he just flicked his hand in front of him. Turning round I was amazed to see at least forty plaques and statuettes in rows behind me.

He was however quite loquacious about his newest venture, a project that earns him no profits, maybe he loses money on it but he beams with delight at the service he renders. He is in the process of republishing old tomes. He sends scouts and intimation by word of mouth that he is interested in publishing books of the period 1800 to 1920. This he says is a boon to the literary culture of the Island since these books, when deteriorated beyond use and repair would just suffer obsolescence/disappearance. He inaugurated this project six months ago and his publishing house has given a new lease of life to 200 tomes. I quote from the Publisher’s Note to the re-issue of the 1891 A comprehensive Grammar of the Sinhala Language published by Abraham Mendis Gunasekera, Interpreter Mudliyar to the Registrar General of Ceylon, and member of the Royal Asiatic Society.

S Godage acknowledges his debt of gratitude to Prof. Tissa Kariyawasam and Ratnasiri Arangala for their assistance in selection of books to be republished.

With evident pride I was shown some copies of these books: The Mahabodhiwansa or History of the Great Bo-tree by Ven. Upatissa Sthavira, edited by Pedinnoruwe Sobhitha, published by H. W. Goonewardhena in 1890. Also Suvineetha Bharya by B. L. Bodhipala, published by G. D. Edmund Seneviratne, Tower Hall, 1929.

This aspect of his social service he has extended to Christian books. If you remember, it was the Dutch colonizers who introduced printing to Ceylon and the publications by them were mostly religious texts of the Dutch Reformed Church. A recently reprinted book is The Dutch Reformation. He is also into Tamil publishing.

He, I am sure, lives modestly. He seems to be highly principled and cares not one jot all for profit, which is very unusual in this day and age. His wife is in sole charge of the bookshop, he said, while he concentrates on the publishing. He has two companies: Godage and Bros Ltd which publishes Sinhala and Tamil books and Godage International Publishing Co. for books, both fiction and non-fiction in English that he branched out to fairly recently. He mentioned he had published Carl Muller and Jean Arasanayagam.

In an interview with Le Roy Robinson on aspects of culture in Sri Lanka, Prof Tissa Kariyawasam mentions the fact that Sirisumana Godage is religious and meditates. I feel he is religious in the correct sense of the word – unworldly, with metta and karuna to other beings, (specially would be authors!) and equanimous. These are qualities one needs to nurture since they are inherently subtle. Mr. Godage’s meditation, which he said he does when possible with no set time or duration, has made him the kind gentleman he is. Getting up each morning at 4.00 a m must surely give him a good start for the busy day ahead of him, all the year round.

Sirisumana Godage is not tall, nor imposing, nor forward in demeanour, but he stands out in any crowd in his immaculate white national costume, with grace and dignity written all over his face.