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Daryaganj Sunday Patri Kitab Bazaar is a local weekly informal market for used books that has been thriving on the streets of Old Delhi every Sunday for the past five decades, before it was closed by the Delhi Municipal Corporation and moved to a different, more enclosed location, in the summer of 2019, just as I started fieldwork. This thesis explores the bazaar as a parallel location for books, and as a site of memory and possibility. Using ethnography, oral narratives, and rhythmanalysis, I examine (a) the bazaar's spatiality, its incidental location, dislocation, and eventual relocation; (b) its various participants, the sellers and buyers, their 'knowledge corpora', their experiences of the bazaar, and encounters with each other and with the books, and (c) the 'parallel' circuits of circulation of second-hand and duplicate books in this market. The question that is central to this thesis, then, is -- to what extent can we call the location of the bookstalls on the pavements, the booksellers and buyers and their knowledge and experience of selling and buying, and the market and circuit distribution of books in the bazaar 'parallel' to an official, formal circuit that runs across publishers, bookshops and their sellers and buyers? Daryaganj Sunday Patri Kitab Bazaar, this thesis shows, runs on a combination of order and chaos. Despite the external and internal forms of regulation and boundary-work, the functioning, structure, and components of this bazaar are provisional and ephemeral. The bazaar derives its element of serendipity from the space of the street. The visually and culturally vibrant aesthetics of this bazaar comprises of booksellers setting up their stalls and pedestrians/book-buyers walking and buying the books arranged either in neat stacks or placed together in heaps. The books that are then 'found' on the streets of Daryaganj are a result of what I call 'double chance encounters': how the booksellers find books that make way to their godowns and bookstalls, and how readers/pedestrians find these books, at the book market. Metaphorically speaking, the search algorithms that this book market incorporates are marked by characteristics such as 'accident', 'arbitrariness', 'unpredictability', 'contingency', 'wonder', 'excitement', and, 'randomness'. The find (n.), then, embodies serendipity. However, like one of the booksellers exclaimed to me in an interview: "there is a machinery working behind this market". This "machinery", as I call it, is the 'parallel' communication circuit(s) of books that the Patri Kitab Bazaar embodies. I introduce three 'parallel' circuits -- (1) the 'traditional circuit' where used and rare books are sold; (2) the 'study-material circuit' which includes syllabus books and their ancillary, 'out-of-syllabus' books; and finally, (3) the 'duplicate circuit', where, pirated/ duplicate books, or what the vendors call 'D' ki kitab are sold in various formats. When removed from the 'original' or 'proper' Darntonian circuit (1972) as waste, excess, or due to a shift in their utility, there is an alteration in the book's worth. In their afterlife, so to speak, the books are found at the bazaar in a (recom)modified, parallel format. In this thesis, 'parallel', as against the 'proper' represents the alternative trajectories, the elasticity of the circulation network, the characteristics of the books, their type, genre, language, structure, spatiality of the market, the nature of the business, and so on. In broader terms, this project aims to fill a gap in the dialogic discipline of Book History. The aim of this thesis is not only to describe the parallel methods and occupants manifested in this market space, but also to theorise it and place it in the contemporary discourses on South Asian Book History and Print Cultures.

Bone is among the most transplanted tissues with more than a million surgical procedures annually in Europe, and around two million worldwide. The regeneration of bone defects, caused by trauma, congenital deformities, age-related bone loss or bone infections represents an urgent challenge for today’s healthcare system. This has fueled the demand of more efficient synthetic bone substitutes. Due to their similar characteristics to the mineral phase of bone, calcium phosphates (CaPs) have raised a lot of interest. Some properties of calcium phosphates, like biodegradability, biocompatibility, bioactivity and osteoconduction represent a great potential for this application. Among them, calcium phosphate cements (CPCs) have additional advantages like injectability and insitu hardening ability. Moreover, the possibility to tune the porosity of CaPs in general and of CPCs in particularmakes them suitablevehicles for local delivery of drugs. Loading CaPs with drugs allows conferring additional functionalities to the synthetic bone grafts, which is of great interest. The main aim of this thesis is to explore CaP bioceramics as vehicles for local delivery of drugs, covering both low temperature biomimetic ceramics, like calcium deficient hydroxyapatite (CDHA), and high temperature sintered ceramics, like beta tricalcium phosphate (β-TCP), in the form of microporous and macroporous substrates. The physic-chemical nature of these bioceramics, their porosity and textural properties plays an essential role in their drug delivery properties. In order to be able to tailor the drug release kinetics of the bioceramics beyond their intrinsic properties, plasma polymerization has been investigated. Plasma is a particular state of a gas, electrically neutral, which is formed by ions, electrons, radicals, metastables, UV and visible radiation and can be employed in different applications. Although plasma polymerization has been widely studied for biomedical applications, its combination with bioceramics is rather unexplored. To select a suitabledrug for bone regeneration, an extensive literature review was done on statins, and more particularly on simvastatin as a potential osteogenic and angiogenic promoter (Chapter 2). This drug was evaluated within macroporous scaffolds of either CDHA or β-TCP as drug delivery vehicles. The drug-loaded materials were plasma-coated with polycaprolactone:poly ethylene glycol (PCL:PEG) co-polymers. The coating covered xvithe micro and nanopores of the CaPs surface and produced complex geometries presenting a nano and micro rough morphology which led to low wettability despite the hydrophilicity of the copolymer. Plasma coating with PCL-co-PEG on scaffolds loaded with simvastatin acid allowed delaying and modulating the drug release from the bone scaffolds depending on the thickness of the layer deposited, which, in turn depended on the initial specific surface area of the CaP (Chapter 3).To further investigate the fundamentals of plasma polymerization on bioceramics, PEG-like polymer coatings of different thickness were deposited on microporous β-TCP loaded with antibiotics. The rough β-TCP surface was associated to strong hydrophobic surface properties, which nevertheless retained their suitablebiological behavior with regard to human osteoblast cells. The microbiological activity of the antibiotics was preserved, and the coatings reduced the total amount of drug released as a function of the increasing plasma treatment time (Chapter 4). In another approach, a statin that had never before been employed in combination withCaPs, Pitavastatin (PITA), was investigated as potentially osteogenic and angiogenic promoter through in vitro studies which revealed dose-dependent enhancement of mineralization and vascularization. The incorporation of PITA to the liquid phase of an injectableCDHA foam allowed obtaining injectablelocal drug delivery scaffolds, without altering their macroporosity or textural properties. The drug release kinetics was affected by the evolving microstructure of the setting of the macroporous cement. Overall the results obtained proved that PITA seems to be a suitablenovel candidate to enhance the osteogenic potential of synthetic bone grafts and identified the required doses to obtain the desired biological effects (Chapter 5).