Rachana Shah

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Rachana Shah is a freelance graphic designer, specializing in book cover and book design. She was born and raised in India, and was brought up in Bombay, attending The Cathedral and John Connon School. Her most notable work is the book design for the novel Timbuctoo. The design has been described in detail in the Los Angeles Review of Books and as "opulent" in The Independent.

Early life and work
After graduation, she moved to the United States, where she received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Graphic Design from the Rhode Island School of Design. In 1994, she moved to New York, where she interned with a number of publishing companies.

Later, she moved to London, where she began working as a full-time book designer at Dorling Kindersley, an international publishing company which specializes in illustrated reference books for adults and children in 51 languages. While at Dorling Kindersley, she participated in the design of numerous highly illustrated books, and was involved in all aspects of book design, including typesetting, styling photo shoots, and commissioning illustrators. After working at Dorling Kindersley for five years, she began working on freelance projects with other publishers such as Random House, Scholastic, Octagon Press, and I.B Tauris, as well as branching out into other areas of design work, including corporate identity, catalogues, and illustration.

Rachana Shah has designed book covers for Amina Shah's Tales from the Bazaars of Arabia and Tales From the Bazaars;, Narendra Singh Sarila's Once a Prince of Sarila; Namita Devidayal's The Music Room; Suraiya Faroqhi's Artisans of Empire; Beyond the Three Seas, edited by Michael H. Fisher; Idries Shah's Knowing How To Know,  Thinkers of the East, The Way of the Sufi and The Englishman's Handbook; Julia Huang's Tribeswomen of Iran; Al-Ghazzali's The Alchemy of Happiness, and Patrick Walker's Towards Independence in Africa.

Shah has also designed the books: Dorling Kindersley's The Encyclopedia of Medicinal Plants, Oz Clarke's Encyclopedia of Wine,  and Clare Maxwell-Hudson's Massage: The Ultimate Illustrated Guide.

Later life and work
In 2003, Shah moved with her husband Tahir Shah to their new home called Dar Khalifa in Casablanca, Morocco and subsequently became a main character in her husband's two books that chronicled their adventures in Morocco: The Caliph's House and In Arabian Nights. Her endurance of the year-long ordeal of remodeling their previously abandoned house in Casablanca caused one blogger to marvel at her patience: "...if I were Tahir Shah's wife Rachna (sic), who had a 3-week old baby at the time of the move, I would have packed my bags and returned to London." Shah had previously appeared with another name (Himala) in one of Tahir Shah's first books, Beyond the Devil's Teeth, which details how the two initially met in India.

Shah is best known for her most recent work, husband Tahir Shah's limited edition release of his novel Timbuctoo. Described in The Independent as "opulent", Timbuctoo is produced in a limited edition hardcover of 5,000 copies with six large fold out maps. Five of these are reprinted from Richard Horwood's Georgian atlas of London, the last, a facsimile of the map published in the original Narrative of Robert Adams. It was designed along the lines of the travel books of two centuries ago, and is a large book, weighing 2 kilos (almost 4.5 lbs). It has marbled endpapers, a silk bookmark, a pouch at the rear with additional inserts. The paper is wood-free, and the cover is embossed with raised gold type. Shah sought out a distinguished printer in Hong Kong that was able to work closely with her to create a book that required such great attention to detail. The Los Angeles Review of Books describes it as having "an antiquarian feel: a lengthy title in gold lettering, marbled end papers, a silk bookmark and several large fold-out maps all evoke the novel’s historical setting."