The Biblio File hosted by Nigel Beale

Why listen to Alexandra Pringle? Because Richard Charkin told me that she's the best editor in the English speaking world, that's why. Alexandra was editor-in-chief at Bloomsbury Publishing for more than two decades. She was recently appointed Executive Publisher. She began her publishing career at the British magazine Art Monthly before joining the women's publisher Virago in 1978. She became Editorial Director in 1984, and moved to Hamish Hamilton in 1991 to undertake the same role. Through much of the 1990s she was a literary agent for, among others, Amanda Foreman, Geoff Dyer, Maggie O'Farrell and Ali Smith. She joined Bloomsbury in 1999 as head of the adult publishing division where her authors included Margaret Atwood, Elizabeth Gilbert, Sheila Hancock, Anne Michaels, Ann Patchett, George Saunders and Richard Ford. Among other things we talk about editing's "what if" conversations, about houseboats, socialism, building confidence, Harry Potter, tempering criticism, teasing, instinct, luck, and yes, arm-hair. Note to Listener: My apologies. The Zoom connection was poor on this one. But what Alexandra has to say is delightful and informative, so I hope you'll agree with me that it's worth putting up with. I plan to interview her again. In person. With a good microphone. On her houseboat.

What's not to like here? Marius Kociejowski is charming, erudite and funny. Why should you listen to him? He's just written a memoir about the soul of the book trade. What happens in bookstores doesn't happen elsewhere​ he says. The multifariousness of human nature is more on show​ here​ ​t​han anywhere else, he says, and ​"​I think it's because of books, what they are, what they release in ourselves, and what they become when we make them magnets to our desires."​ The ​memoir is called A Factotum in the Book Trade. We talk about it and the lives of the booksellers​, collectors and characters ​Marius has​​ lived ​with for close to five decades​. He reveals secrets and describes feuds. He gives us a wonderful feel for the workings of the London Antiquarian book trade over the past fifty years. Bertram and Anthony Rota, Bernard and Martin Stone, Bill Hoffer, Peter Ellis, Raymond Danowski. They're all here. Have a listen. (speaking of which, listening that is, thank you so much to all of you who have so loyally listened to my podcast over the years. Your attention, feedback, and friendship, has meant a great deal to me. No, I'm not quitting. Just want to express my gratitude).

I'm in Prague for the Summer. Going to be participating in one of the world's leading creative writing programs. I interviewed its founder Richard Katrovas. Why listen to Richard? Having run the Prague Summer Program for Writers for more than two decades, he knows a lot about the process of teaching creative writing; plus he knows karate. We talk about listening and critiquing artfully, not fucking with style, the formalization of a sense of literary community; counter-culture, the literary conversation, literary communities in different epochs, communal writing, work-shopping, the genius of the English language incorporating other languages, publishing first books, validation, the importance of self-esteem and personal prestige, the desire for social relevance, Ernest Becker; 'who touches a book touches a man,' book fetishes, the weirdness of poetry and Prague, ripping off books, living in the Projects, and much more. This is part one of the conversation. I'll conduct part two once I've gone through the wringer.

Why did I interview Mark Andrews? Because he's a fellow Canadian, he's an exceptional book collector who brings an engineer's mind to the task, and he's just published a beautiful book featuring selections from his book collection, entitled The Science and Engineering of Water; An illustrated catalogue of books and manuscripts on Italian hydraulics, 1500 - 1800; it's exemplary. Exactly the kind of thing every book collector should think about doing - in some iteration - with his/her/their own collection. ​Mark's catalogue ​explores the development of science and engineering through the early modern period​ by presenting 367 printed books, manuscripts and maps​ in chronological order​. They highlight the relationship between the evolution of ideas and the authors who documented th​e​se ideas. Drawing from Mark​'s larger collection of civil engineering​ titles, ​​it's filled with​ illustrations and diagrams​ (nearly 1000), ​from books that were used as​ working ​tools by Italian scientists, engineers, and builders​ from the early 1500s to the ​end of the 1700s. ​Trust me. While books on Italian hydraulics may not sound exactly riveting, they are. At least, they are when Mark talks about them.

Why am I interviewing Mark Samuels Lasner for a third time? Because he's a recognized and respected book collector who knows how to speak intelligently and amusingly about books. And though we've already talked about his impressive collections that cover late 19th century British literary culture, and The Bodley Head, I wanted to learn about what happens "after the dopamine" hits. What he's done with his collections - the cataloguing, the scholarship, the exhibitions, the research, the talks - how has he worked with his books to help share their collective lessons, to better understand the worlds and relationships they document? And how can you do the same with your collection? That's why I interviewed him a third time.

I came across Kat McKenna's name in an article written by Alison Flood in The Guardian last year. I'd googled Tik Tok's "Book-Tok" because I'd heard it was moving a lot of YA books and wanted to learn more. Kat was quoted in Alison's piece. It was clear she knew what made BookTok tick. I contacted her and now she's on the show. Kat has worked in UK publishing for almost 15 years specialising in children's and teen/YA marketing and brand strategy, and "delivers exciting and audience driven marketing campaigns to most of the major publishers as a freelancer, working on brands including World Book Day, Jacqueline Wilson, Supertato and more." She bills herself as an early innovator of digital and social media in publishing, and today she's still very much on top of what's going on. She sent me a list of links to various examples of how young people are using Book Tok these days, here: Books that made me cry: (@justmemyselfandi) Here They Both Die At the End moodboard (@emmyslibrary): here Convincing you to read We Were Liars (@alifeofliterature): here If you like this Harry Styles song, read this book (@sophiebooks): here Want to work in books? (@hotkeybooks - publisher account!) here Why do books smell like they do (@hotkeybooks) here Translations of my book by country (@Caseymcquiston - author) here Aesthetic of The Inheritance Games (@.bookobsessed) here A book Tiktok made me read that was not good (@emdobereading - based on a sound trend - we can talk more about those tomorrow!) here Convincing you to read books based on their first line (@jennajustreads) here Heartstopper - page to screen love (@rafept) here So, lots to talk about. Re: my question about who owns Tik Tok: results are pretty murky. Yes, the Chinese government has a stake in it. How much control it has over operations is open to question. Lots, is what its American competitors would like people to believe. Relatively little it seems if you're a Tik Tok spokesperson. The Guardian again, here.

Stephen Enniss is director of the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas in Austin. Previous posts include Head Librarian at the Folger Shakespeare Library and Director of Emory University's Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library where he made a series of impressive acquisitions including the archives of Seamus Heaney, Salman Rushdie and Ted Hughes. Since taking over at the Ransom Center in 2013, Stephen has overseen the acquisition of the archives of Ian McEwan, J.M. Coetzee, Kazuo Ishiguro, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Michael Ondaatje, among others. We met via Zoom to discuss his role as director of a special collections library; where Martin Amis is, and Christopher Hitchens, Clive James and other members of their group. About fighting oblivion; about the value and challenges of email archives and negotiating or not negotiating with Andrew Wylie; about Texan "nationalism," and the goals of attracting books and people, and developing a "civilization;" about diversity, and hiring practices and collection development policies; about cataloguing, bureaucracies, acquisitions, books bridging political divides, the Gotham Book Mart, sweet little exhibition catalogues, and much more.

Sarah Miniaci is a freelance book publicist with fifteen years of experience in the New York and Toronto markets. Ken Whyte's Sutherland House is one of her clients. Ken interviewed Sarah for a recent issue of Shush, his excellent Substack newsletter on the publishing business. Together they surveyed today's new publishing landscape. With the help of Michael Legat's An Author's Guide to Publishing, Sarah and I do the same here, only with our voices, tracing the evolution of book publicity from Legat's pre-2000 traditional publishing world, up to the present. We talk about the advent of the Internet and blogs, about gatekeepers and democratization, about how easy and boring life used to be for a publicist, about the shift to Social, about the importance of Goodreads, about producing trailers and Q & As for Youtube, about compiling lists, rocket science, passionate bloggers, influencers, the literary conversation, the continued relevance of the publishers' sales catalogue, ​geese, swans, "golden children," quality, and the imperative to make money, the Last Bookstore in L.A., and Toyota Corollas.

Author/historian Stuart Kells has been chasing rare books and other bookish treasures since childhood. In the 1980s he went for classic sci-fi paperbacks from Ace and Dell, and authors such as Philip K. Dick and Robert Heinlein. When he moved to Melbourne in the summer of 1989 he was amazed by the city's bookshops, especially secondhand shops - notably Alice's and Sainsbury's in Carlton. When ​he wasn't looking for books​ here he was fossicking in the Co-op bookshop at Melbourne University, or hunting for ​them at markets and fetes. For the past 26 years​ he's been a regular at Camberwell Market where great books can be found, along with almost everything else. Vividly remembered finds include Iain Banks and Vikram Seth firsts; classic Australian crime pulps; rare maps; and advertising and ephemera of every kind. I connected with Stuart recently via Zoom to talk about Penguin and the Lane Brothers, ​his revealing, myth-busting book about the intimate partnership of Allen, Richard and John Lane – and how it explains the success of Penguin Books, the twentieth century's "greatest publishing house." We talk about the spirit of daring and creative opposition that drove the brothers to publish so many quality books on such a massive scale at such affordable prices – and how together they achieved a revolution in modern book publishing.

Over the past half-century, bookselling, like many retail sectors, has evolved from an business dominated by independent bookstores to one in which chain stores have significant market share. This transformation has often been a less-than-smooth process, especially so in bookselling, argues Laura J. Miller, because more than most other consumer goods, books are the focus of passionate debate. What drives this debate? And why do so many people believe that bookselling should be immune to questions of profit? Laura and I discuss some of the answers to these questions which were first raised back in 2006 when her book Reluctant Capitalists Bookselling and the Culture of Consumption was published. Laura is Professor and Chair of Sociology at Brandeis University where she arrived in 2002, having previously taught at the University of Western Ontario and Vassar College. She teaches courses in the sociology of culture, the mass media, food studies, and urban sociology. Her research is centered on understanding the interaction between cultural and economic processes.

Jonathan Kay is a Canadian journalist. He was editor-in-chief of The Walrus magazine, and is a senior editor of Quillette. He was previously comment pages editor, columnist, and blogger for the Toronto-based Canadian daily newspaper National Post, and continues to contribute to the newspaper on a freelance basis. He's also a ghostwriter, best known in this capacity as the author of Justin Trudeau's memoir Common Ground. During our conversation we talk about Jon's ghostwriting practice - riffing off an article he wrote on the topic for Quillette entitled 'My Life as a Ghostwriter' ( https://quillette.com/2021/09/26/my-life-as-a-ghostwriter/ ) - about gaming influencing ghostwriting; storytelling, people hovering in the background, literary prostitution, humour checks, anonymity, Mitt Romney, eliciting details, the political messaging in Justin Trudeau's memoir, the best part about being a ghostwriter, lawyers wanting to know everything, well-rounded depictions, the truth, self-publishing; luck, alchemy and 50 Shades of Grey, The Making of the Bible by Konrad Schmid and Jens Schröter, blurred stages and immersion, Tarantino, and kitchen design, among other things.

Kathryn Schulz joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in 2015. In 2016, she won the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing and a National Magazine Award for "The Really Big One," her story on seismic risk in the Pacific Northwest. Previously, she was the book critic for New York, the editor of the environmental magazine Grist, and a reporter and editor at the Santiago Times. She is the author of Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error. We talk about Lost and Found, her just published memoir, about making the planet less lonely, dark places, a sense of the beautiful, math formulas, love, death, loss, discovery, commonplace experiences, the history of words, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Frost, being proud of others, privacy, foggy grief, technicolour worlds, noticing details, surprises, essays and memoirs, bearing witness, and and.

Larry Grobel is a journalist, author and teacher. He has written more than 25 books including Conversations with Capote (which received a PEN Special Achievement award) and The Art of the Interview (which has been used as a text in many journalism schools), most of his books however are short story collections. His latest is called The Narcissist. Over the years he's written for dozens of publications including the New York Times, Rolling Stone, and Entertainment Weekly, but he's best known for his Playboy magazine interviews. Larry created the M.F.A. in Professional Writing for Antioch University and taught in the English Department at UCLA for ten years. We met via Zoom to talk about how he conceives of, and writes, his short stories.

James Wood is a literary critic, essayist and novelist. He was The Guardian's chief literary critic between 1992 and 1995, and a senior editor at The New Republic between 1995 and 2007. Since roughly that time he's taught the Practice of Literary Criticism at Harvard University and has been a staff writer and book critic at The New Yorker magazine. In 2009, he won the National Magazine Award for reviews and criticism. Books include How Fiction Works, the novel Upstate, and essay collections The Irresponsible Self, The Broken Estate and most recently Serious Noticing. We talk about James's role as a book critic - how and why he does it - about realism, the canon, 'lifeness', sameness, his intro to Serious Noticing, our shared love of the Russians, looking for great writing everywhere, Virginia Woolf, Joyce, Zadie Smith; Vasily Grossman's Stalingrad, what writers do when they walk into a room...plus, I quote Clifton Fadiman and Henry James at far too great a length.

William Taylor Jr. is a cataloger with PBA Galleries, a San Francisco-based auction house for rare books and ephemera; he specializes in fine literature, counterculture and poetry. He's an avid reader, and a prolific writer. His first book of fiction is included in the curriculum at select universities across the United States. In 2013 he was the recipient of an Acker Award, a tribute named after groundbreaking writer Kathy Acker given to members of the avant-garde arts communities in both New York and San Francisco who have made outstanding contributions to their discipline. We talk here about PBA Galleries, about Bill's role as a cataloguer and auctioneer, about how to sell your rare books using PBA's services; about what those services are; about commissions, first editions of Huxley's Brave New World in very good plus dust jackets (actually the item in question was in NF/NF condition), printed catalogues, Bukowski, the Beats, reasons to sell via an auction house versus eBay, and much more

Damon Galgut is a South African novelist and playwright. He was awarded the 2021 Booker Prize for his novel The Promise and shortlisted for the prize in 2003 and 2010 right about the time I first interviewed him at his apartment in Cape Town (listen here). Damon was head boy at Pretoria Boys High School, matriculating in 1981, and then studied drama at the University of Cape Town. He wrote his first novel, A Sinless Season (1982), when he was 17. We met via Zoom to talk about his life as a writer and how he writes novels. Among other things we discuss his Parker fountain pen, Chekhov's brilliant short story 'The Kiss' (hat tip to James Wood). We also riff together off John Gardner's classic On Becoming a Novelist. Good idea to read both if you want to get the most out of our conversation.

Biblio.com started as a price comparison engine for new and used books in 2000. Later, this price comparison engine became SearchBiblio.com famous for several years as the Internet's fastest "metasearch" site for books. In the summer of 2003 Biblio.com launched as a used books marketplace, working off a 'triple bottom line' using these goals: achieving profit, serving people, and preserving the environment. Biblio's founder, Brendan Sherar has a life-long passion and appreciation for books. A former bookstore owner, he has been involved in the transformation of the book industry from the earliest days of the Internet. He has a B.A. in economics from University of North Carolina at Asheville and is a graduate student at Georgia Institute of Technology. In his spare time, he enjoys running, soccer, hiking, playing piano, gardening, and traveling extensively. I met with Brendan via Zoom to talk about the differences between Biblio and its larger competitors, about Biblio's first ever live virtual Antiquarian Book Fair scheduled for March 24-26, 2022, about how booksellers can best increase their online sales, tips for book buyers wanting to shop online, advice on book collecting, how Biblio is working to match collectors with buyers and sellers, and much more.

Glenn Horowitz is an agent in the sale and placement of culturally significant archives to research institutions throughout the United States. Authors, artists, musicians, designers, and photographers represented include Bob Dylan, Norman Mailer, James Salter, Eve Babitz, Deborah Eisenberg, David Foster Wallace, Vladimir Nabokov, and many more. We spoke recently via Zoom about his practice: what he does and how he does it. Topics covered include polyps; making bookseller websites accessible to the disabled; looking for and selling value; Sting and estates; the disappearance of printed bookseller catalogues; the human touch; Hemingway; unique copies; avoiding book fairs and bookseller associations; nostalgia; unorthodox archives; the Kitchen Sisters; unused video games; the fact that every bookseller is now an archives dealer; Against The Tide Commentaries On A Collection Of African Americana 1711-1987; Johnny Cochran; and much more.

John Sargent is an American book publisher; until recently he was the CEO of Macmillan Publishers USA, and Executive Vice President of the Georg von Holtzbrinck Publishing Group where he oversaw global trade operations; he was also responsible for Macmillan Learning, the company's US-based higher education business. We talk via Zoom about his career in publishing, not about libraries; about being sales reps, and doing cold calls; Columbia Business School, complex balance sheets and P & Ls; his grandfather Effendi (F.N. Doubleday); publishing great saleable books; supporting Joseph Conrad and Somerset Maugham; agents; movies selling books; advances; intuition and good taste; managing and motivating people and having fun; honesty; embracing and appreciating authors; sharing your enthusiasm for what you do; getting out of your silo; the unreplicable experience of reading, and producing movies in your own head; Frederick Forsyth; autobiography; self-publishing and gate keepers; hyperbole and blurbs, noise and signals; Bill O'Reilly, and more.

Jerry Kelly is a​ ​book designer, calligrapher​ ​and type designer. Before starting his own design business in 1998 ​he was Vice President of The Stinehour Press​. Prior to this he worked as a designer at A. Colish. ​Jerry's work has been honored ​frequently; for example, his book designs have been selected more than thirty times for the AIGA "Fifty Books of the Year"​ Award.​ In 2015 he was presented with the 28th Goudy Award from RIT. ​He has served as Chairman of the American Printing History Association​ and President of The Typophiles, and​ has worked ​o​n ​numerous committees at The Grolier Club. He has written​ several books on calligraphy and typography, including The Noblest Roman: The Centaur Types (co-authored with Misha Beletsky; winner of the 2016 Bibliographical Society of America Prize) and​Type Revivals.​ His best known book is probably A Century for the Century, a catalogue of the 100 most beautiful, finely printed books produced during the twentieth century, which we refer to in our conversation, along with referencing some of the most beautiful catalogue work Jerry ​has done for clients including booksellers Jonathan A. Hill and Glenn Horowitz, and The Grolier Club.

Andrew Wylie is an American literary agent. He grew up in Sudbury, Massachusetts and attended St. Paul's School in Concord, New Hampshire. He has a degree from Harvard University where he studied Romance Languages & Literatures. Wylie founded his eponymous literary agency in New York in 1980 and opened a second office in London in 1996. The firm now represents more than 1400 authors and literary estates. We met via Zoom to discuss what he does and how he does it. We talk about, among other things, his early experience building the business, authors getting ripped off, calculating and elucidating the true value of great literary works, bound daytime television, Danielle Steel, traveling the world, late mornings and the great British publishing tradition, Roger Straus and Fuck you very much, channeling Susan Sontag, the Zen of Andy Warhol, spider plants, hollow men, advances as guarantees of good service, discovering new literature, doing what you love until you die, and much more. Andrew also sings.

Richard Charkin is a British publishing executive. He founded Mensch Publishing in 2018. Prior to this he was Executive Director of Bloomsbury (2007 to 2018). Over the years he has held executive positions at Pergamon Press, Oxford University Press, and Reed International/Reed Elsevier. He is the former Chief Executive of Macmillan Publishers Limited and Executive Director of Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck. We met via Zoom to talk about what he's learned over the past several years running Mensch, his tiny publishing firm; specifically we discuss Frankfurt, understanding assets, and measuring various publishing activities in order to save time and money. * Apologies for the poor audio. Zoom connection was abnormally poor on this one.

Warren Kinsella is a Canadian lawyer, author, musician, political consultant, commentator and sometime painter. He has written for most of Canada's major newspapers and is currently a columnist for the Toronto Sun. He is the founder of the Daisy Consulting Group, a Toronto-based firm that engages in paid political campaign strategy work, lobbying and communications crisis management. Prior to this he played various roles in the Liberal government, including special assistant to Jean Chrétien, former Prime Minister of Canada. He has written ten books, including non-fiction on terrorism, racism, and punk rock, and a novel entitled Party Favours. We met via Zoom to discuss the political book genre. Topics of conversation included Warren's father Douglas, the types of people who write political books, motivations for writing political books, Chretien's Straight from the Heart, books written pre and post power, books on Justin Trudeau, movies that make you feel shitty, the Canada Council, prime minister biographies and autobiographies, Dick Morris's The New Prince, Marions Antiques in Brighton, Ontario, The Kinsella Diaries, and much more

Steven Heller is an eminent American graphic designer, art director, art critic and scholar.​ He ​has authored or​ co-authored ​more than 200 ​books which variously trace​ the history of typography, illustration and other subjects related to graphic design.​ I talk with Steve here about Alvin Lustig an American American book designer, graphic designer and typeface designer. Some of Lustig's most innovative work was for New Directions, the independent publishing firm. For example, he designed more than seventy iconic dust jackets for the New Classics literature and other series from the mid-40s until his death in 1955. His non-literal designs exuded a modern art sensibility and incorporated a fresh approach to typeface design that defined the New Directions look. Steve and I met via Zoom to discuss Born Modern: The Life and Design of Alvin Lustig a book he co-wrote with Elaine Lustig Cohen, Alvin's widow. Among other things we talk about magic shows and magicians, design as sleight of hand, illusions, tactility, Frank Lloyd Wright, hot metal, Constructivism, helicopters, furniture design, Ward Ritchie, New Directions, James Laughlin, expressionistic modernism, primitive art, catholic church propagandists, soldier's ribbon bars, being close to genius, Alvin's blindness, and Steve's forthcoming memoir Growing up Underground (Princeton Architectural Press, 2022).

Terry O'Reilly is a Canadian broadcast producer and personality best known for hosting the CBC radio/podcast programs O'Reilly on Advertising, The Age of Persuasion, and Under the Influence, which together have been downloaded more than 40 million times. His programs examine the cultural and sociological impact of advertising and marketing on modern life. His books include The Age of Persuasion, This I Know, and most recently, My Best Mistakes: Epic Fails and Silver Linings. We met via Zoom to talk about how to market a book, about knowing the reader, ideas and passions, getting to audiences, finding your readers, all-terrain advertising, social media, podcasts and platforms, communities and fans, authors' marketing activities, trivia and tidbits, free first chapters, reaching out to interviewers, discoverability, bookmarks, visiting bookstores and signing books, speeches, word-of-mouth, interacting on social media, relationships and tone, kindness, dust jacket ideas, book spines, design as narrative, elevator pitches and much more.

Margaret Atwood is a Canadian novelist, essayist, poet, teacher, environmental activist, and inventor. She has written plenty of books, many of them prize-winners. For example, she's won "two Booker Prizes (latest in 2019, co-winner, for The Testaments), the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the Governor General's Award, the Franz Kafka Prize, Princess of Asturias Awards, and the National Book Critics and PEN Center USA Lifetime Achievement Awards." Several of her works, including The Handmaid's Tale, have been adapted for the screen, big and small. I think of her as a bird. In fact that's how I introduce her - as a cross between an osprey and a magpie. She's partial to phoenixes. We talk about her book Negotiating with the Dead (recently reissued as On Writers and Writing), and about the many reasons why writers write; about writer grants and Shakespeare; appealing to audiences; and geese, totalitarianism and not telling writers what to do; about Dante and bringing stories back from the past; about illuminating the darkness; spiders and witches, compromise, and interviewers hounding authors for interviews. Plus a fair amount more.

Hermione Lee was President of Wolfson College from 2008 to 2017 and is Emeritus Professor of English Literature in the English Faculty at Oxford University. She is a biographer and critic whose work includes biographies of Virginia Woolf (1996), Edith Wharton (2006) and Penelope Fitzgerald (2013, winner of the 2014 James Tait Black Prize for Biography and one of the New York Times best 10 books of 2014). She has also written books on Elizabeth Bowen, Philip Roth and Willa Cather, and a collection of essays on life-writing, Body Parts. In 2003 she was made a CBE and in 2013 she was made a Dame for services to literary scholarship. We met via Zoom to talk about the what, how and why of biography, and the role of the biographer. During our conversation I reference a book that Hermione wrote in 2009 called Biography: A Very Short Introduction. Topics covered include the practice of autopsy and portraiture; truth and fiction; empathy; conversation; selection and shaping; gossip, privacy and intrusion; the multiplicity of selves and identities; 'definitive' lives; vivid details; anecdotes; obsessional commitment, and detachment; Freud and psychoanalysis; unknowns and gaps; objectivity; Richard Holmes's memoir Footsteps; and Virginia Woolf.

"After working in computer systems analysis for a decade, John Burnside became a full-time writer in 1994. John has published 14 books of poetry, and has won the Geoffrey Faber Prize, the Whitbread Poetry Prize, the Petrarca Preis and, most recently, the Forward and T.S. Eliot Prizes for his poetry. He has also published eight novels and a memoir. He is Professor of English at the University of St Andrews." We met to talk about the what, how and why of poetry as described in his book of criticism The Music of Time. Topics discussed include poetry making nothing happen, poetry making lots happen, paying attention, listening, lightening rods, the sound of the earth, everyday life, elitism, the questions that dog humans, the human name not meaning shit to a tree, connections, LSD and the continuum, dams, killing lawyers, understanding systems and not understanding them, Facebook, the "n" word, compost heaps, Leopardi, Montale, and more...

Jaleen Grove is a Canadian artist and art historian whose area of focus is the history of illustration in the US and Canada. She teaches at the Rhode Island School of Design, has written monographs on illustrators Oscar Cahén and Walter Haskell Hinton and has served as associate editor for the Journal of Illustration. She is associate editor of the 592-page History of Illustration (Bloomsbury, 2018), and author of a chapter in it entitled 'Avant Garde Illustration 1900-1950' which is the topic of our conversation here, one that incorporates modernism, livres d'artiste, Cubism, Bauhaus; the importance of collecting, preserving and studying ephemera, and more.

Steven Heller is an eminent American graphic designer, art director, art critic and scholar.​ He ​has authored or​ co-authored ​more than 200 ​books which variously trace​ the history of typography, illustration and other subjects related to graphic design.​ I talk with Steve about Paul Rand an American art director and graphic designer best known for his corporat​e designs which include logos for IBM, UPS, Westinghouse, ​and ​ABC​. ​ Rand was a professor​ of graphic design at Yale University​ ​from 1956​ to 1985​. He once said that of all of his work, he was proudest of his magazine and book covers. Book covers!

Daniel Mendelsohn "is an internationally bestselling author, critic, essayist, and translator. Born in New York City in 1960, he received degrees in Classics from the University of Virginia and Princeton. After completing his Ph.D. he moved to New York City, where he began freelance writing full time; since 1991 he has been a prolific contributor of essays, reviews, and articles to many publications, most frequently The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books." We met via Zoom to discuss the role of the literary critic and how Daniel performs it. We talk about who he is {okay, just part of who he is), what he does, how he does it, and why it's important; about how the critic, by looking behind our reactions, helps us to better understand and appreciate the meaning and significance of a work of art; about critics expressing the intangible and ineffable; the distinction between criticism and opinion; criticism as a service industry; disagreeing with critics; criticism as metaphor; criticism as storytelling; communities of intelligent people; and how really mind-blowing it is that we're all kicking stones around here on a planet that's spinning at some incredible speed moving through a gigantic space that seems devoid of meaning, and we don't know why. Which is why, of course, narrative is so important. It stops us from being scared shitless all of the time. Criticism helps us to figure out how narrative does this. This, and much more.

Fifteen years ago I interviewed Michael Cader at Book Expo in Toronto. The advice he had for publishers at the time remains remarkably fresh and valuable. Michael is the founder of Publisher's Lunch, the largest book publishing industry publication in the world. Each day it's e-mailed out to more than 45,000 people. We talk about process, and transparency, extras, the role of a creative person, finding audiences while you're alive, the satisfaction of engaging with an audience, bringing work to the public, enabling public discussion, and more.

William (Bill) Matthews has been dealing in old & rare books, manuscripts, maps and related material since 1976. He began working for a bookshop in Saskatoon, then opened his own in Vancouver in 1976, and subsequently moved to Toronto in 1980. He was in Ontario until 1996 when he moved to San Francisco / Berkeley and was part of Peter Howard's Serendipity Books for a few years. He's now the proud owner of The Haunted Bookshop, a bricks and mortar shop in Sydney, B.C. just north of Victoria. We met in the shop to talk about Bill's career in the used book business, about young collectors; Odean Long, previous long-time owner of The Haunted Bookshop; pseudonymously and anonymously authored books; scouting trips, Acres of Books in Cincinnati, little book fairs, book scouts Martin Stone and David Sachs, Driff's Guide to All the Second-hand and Antiquarian Bookshops in Britain, fantasy fiction, booksellers Peter Howard and Bill Hoffer, the great Winnipeg book sale, Maurice Sendak, and much more. After our conversation Bill and I chatted a bit about Saskatoon, where the two of us had grown up, discovering that we'd both gone to the same high school, at the same time - in the same grade. Bill later produced the yearbook to prove it. Apologies in advance for the poor audio quality (something about soft-spoken booksellers and the acoustics of used bookstores).

Don Stewart is the proprietor of MacLeod's Books at 455 West Pender Street in downtown Vancouver, a shop famed for its magnificent piles of books, wide selection and narrow aisles. Stewart bought MacLeod's Books in 1973 from Van Andruss who'd bought it from Don MacLeod a few years after it opened in 1964. He moved the business into larger premises in 1981 only to see the place burn down the next year - so he had to start again from scratch. Ironically, for the past ten years he's had to contend with Vancouver Fire Department regulations in order just to keep his doors open. Instructed to reduce the number of books in his shop, ​his only options have been to stuff ​things in storage and sell​ as much as he can. Recent zealousness exhibited by the VFD may well be connected in part to the rapaciousness of area developers. Contrary to current rumours the shop will not be closing. I met with Don in the stacks of his shop to talk about his career in bookselling, about homelessness, British Columbia as rich terrain for all manner of book culture, legendary West Coast booksellers Stephen McIntyre and Bill Hoffer, socialism, and anarchy, among other things.

Dr Falk Eisermann is head of the Incunabula Division at the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin and is considered a world expert in the field. He also heads the Gesamtkatalog der Wiegendrucke (Union catalogue of incunabula), GW for short. Founded in 1904 it's objective is to list all 15th-century items printed from movable type. Today the job is reportedly about fifty percent complete. Lots of work remains. I met with Falk in his green-carpeted office at the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin to talk about his role as a rare books librarian, about incunabula, and about his quest to find and catalogue it all.

Dan Morgan is the proprietor of an antiquarian bookstore in Prague 6 that replicates the feel and function of a living room. Back in the 1990s Dan was invited by his future wife to visit Prague. He never left. In 2008 he 'got into' books thanks to a woman who sold them in his neighbourhood and who introduced him to Czech modernism and Samizdat. Coming full circle, by good fortune he was able recently to buy the entire stock of her original bookstore. I met with Dan at his shop. We talk about the cultural evenings he hosts, about the unheard stories that people tell of Prague's past; the important role Cubism played in moving Czech book design from Art Nouveau to Modernism; book designers Josef Casek, Ladislav Sutnar and Jaroslav Svab; the huge influence of renaissance man Karel Teige ('Captain of the Avant-Garde') and his ABC book; Jindřich Toman's amazing monographs on Czech modernist book design, notably the one on photo montage; Toyen; visually striking books; a collector's intuition; and the quality, but inexpensive, books produced by state-run publishing house Dru stevní Práce.

Library exhibition catalogues, just like Bookseller catalogues, constitute a damned fine collecting area if you ask me. Beautiful, informative, and cheap - especially when you consider how much money and time, care and attention goes into producing them - they're well worth acquiring, despite not being particularly rare. What better service can I provide the collector to get a grip on this under-appreciated field than to talk to someone who evaluates them if not exactly for a full-time living, then certainly for a good time? Emma Sarconi is a librarian and book historian who seeks "to facilitate conversations around the impact of special collections in our lives by providing quality reference services, instruction design, project management and event planning." She currently works as the Reference Professional for Special Collections in Firestone Library at Princeton University, and chairs the RBMS Leab Exhibition Awards Committee. The Leab Awards are given annually in recognition of excellence in the publication of catalogues and brochures that accompany exhibitions of library and archival materials. They are administered by the Exhibition Awards Committee of the ALA/ACRL Rare Books and Manuscripts Section (RBMS), whose operating expenses are covered by a generous endowment from Katharine Kyes Leab and Daniel J. Leab, editors of American Book Prices Current. I spoke with Emma via Zoom about the criteria used by the committee to judge the catalogues.

Jordi Nadal was born in Barcelona in 1962 and holds a degree in Germanic Studies from the University of Barcelona. In 1998 he took the Stanford Professional Publishing Course and then began his career at Vicens Vives, later moving to Herder (Germany). He has been director of EDHASA, editorial and publications director of Círculo de Lectores, consultant at Random House in New York, general director of corporate development for Spain and America at Grupo Plaza & Janés and assistant director at Ediciones Paidós, as well as Deputy General Manager at Planeta Agostini Profesional and Formación. In 2007 he founded Plataforma Editorial. He is the co-author of Meditating Management… and Life (Plataforma Editorial, 2012) and author of, among other books, Libroterapia (Plataforma Editorial, 2017, 2020) and The Invention of the Bicycle (Plataforma Editorial, 2020). We met via Zoom to discuss his book Book Therapy: Reading Is Life (Mensch Publishing, 2021). Our conversation covers, among other things: how actions and inactions characterize reading; whether or not reading 'betters' a person; Camus and being kind to others in an unhappy world; why we're motivated to share treasures and enthusiasms with friends, and how reading and writing is so very human. It's a lively, colourful encounter with a passionate reader, writer, publisher and white-shirt enthusiast.

For years Paul Delaney was professor of English at the University of Moncton; prior to this he taught at various institutions in London, England. During his lifetime he has had an ongoing interest in Acadian genealogy, a topic upon which he continues to publish and conduct research. His biography of Charles de Sousy Ricketts (1866-1931), published in 1990, was the first major study of a man whose "spirited career encompassed many aspects of late Victorian and Edwardian culture," including fine press book design and production, stage design, typography, painting, sculpture, art criticism, and art collecting. Friends included W.B. Yeats, Thomas Moore, ​A. E. ​Housman, ​Oscar Wilde and many other luminaries of the period. Drawing upon a wide range of material​, much of it unpublished​ and/​or newly discovered​ at the time​, ​​Delaney ​"​reveals a man of strong opinions and artistic convictions"​ ​who despite a ​fierce opposition to Post Impressionism and ​​Modernism​, was noted for his love and deep ​knowledge of art, as well as his ​wit, ​conviviality, generosity and ​artistic ​versatility.​​​ ​​Delaney's biography illuminates cultural and artistic​ life in England​ during the 1890s and early decades of the​ 20th​ century​, and provides a detailed portrait of one of the period's great personalities. ​Ricketts, during his lifetime, established a reputation as a​ great​​​ art connoisseur​. In 1915 ​he ​turned down ​an offer ​to become director​ of the National Gallery​, a decision he later regretted​. He did however ​serve​ "disastrously" as adviser to the National Gallery of Canada from 1924 until his death in 1931. ​He also wrote three books of art criticism, two volumes of short stories and a memoir of ​Oscar ​Wilde. Selections from his letters and diaries were​ ​published​ posthumously​. I met with Paul Delaney at his home in Moncton, New Brunswick, where we talked about, among other things, his nom de plume (J. G. P. Delaney), about Ricketts of course, and his adventurous mother; about Ricketts' long time companion artist Charles Shannon; about publisher and editor Rupert Hart Davis, and about Paul's experience writing the biography of artist Glyn Philpot.

Andrew Coyne needs little introduction to Canadian audiences. He writes a weekly column for the Toronto Globe and Mail newspaper and is a member of the At Issue panel on CBC TV's The National newscast. He has previously been national editor of Maclean's magazine and a columnist for the National Post newspaper. James Elliott Coyne (1910-2012) was a scholar, lawyer, public servant, family man, and "practicing eccentric." A Rhodes scholar, and captain of the Oxford University hockey team, he practiced law with his father in Winnipeg during the 1930s before joining the Bank of Canada's research bureau in 1938. He became deputy governor in 1950, and governor in 1955, succeeding Graham Towers. During his tenure he was embroiled in a much publicized conflict with Prime Minister John Diefenbaker, known as the Coyne Affair, which led to his resignation and a clarification in the role required of the governor of the Bank of Canada. I met with Andrew Coyne via Zoom to discuss his extraordinary father. Our conversation includes a response to my assertion that understanding James Coyne requires an appreciation of how deeply he felt about Canadian independence, and economic nationalism.

Canada has an impressive tradition of producing great printer- publishers. Three of our best are Stan Bevington, Tim Inkster, and Andrew Steeves. Ancient interviews with all three can be found here on The Biblio File website. The one with Andrew took place a dozen years ago so I figured it was time to clock another. I drove down to Kentville, Nova Scotia last month, where Andrew lives and works, and sat down with him again right next to the place where the wall cordoning off his office used to sit (it came down about a decade ago), inches away from where our previous talk too place. Andrew bills himself as a writer, editor, typographer, letterpress printer and literary publisher. Over the past two decades he's won more than 50 citations for excellence in book design from Canada's Alcuin Society. His essay collection Smoke Proofs: Essays on Literary Publishing, Printing and Typography appeared in 2014. We talk here mostly about the specifics of book design and how Andrew makes books that very beautifully and aptly express their contents; we also discuss the challenge of selecting titles; the use pilcrows, the importance in life of paying attention, and much more.

Michele K. Troy is professor of English at Hillyer College at the University of Hartford. She studies Anglo-American literary modernism in continental Europe and is the author of Strange Bird: The Albatross Press and the Third Reich, the first book to be written about the Albatross Press, a Penguin precursor, that entered into an uneasy relationship with the Nazi regime to keep Anglo-American literature alive under fascism. The press was, from its beginnings in 1932, a "strange bird": a cultural outsider to the Third Reich but an economic insider. It was funded by British-Jewish interests. Its director was rumored to work for British intelligence. It distributed fiction in English by both mainstream and edgier modernist authors such as D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and Ernest Hemingway to eager continental readers. Yet Albatross printed and sold its paperbacks from the heart of Hitler's Reich. Michele and I talk about how weird this is, among other things.

Since 1972, Dr. Steven Lomazow has been building a collection of important American periodicals; it's now considered to be the most extensive in private hands. "The Steven Lomazow Collection of American Periodicals has been curated for the purpose of demonstrating the role of magazines as a reflection of all aspects American popular culture from pre-revolutionary times to the present day." Highlights of the collection were featured in an exhibition at The Grolier Club in New York this Spring called Magazines and the American Experience. A celebration of this vitally important American medium, the exhibition illustrated, among other things, how magazines fostered the development of distinct communities of Americans by creating networks of communication. The accompanying catalogue expands upon the exhibition with a series of essays by leading media historians. It's enhanced by more than four hundred illustrations. Steven has been a consultant to the Newseum in Washington, D.C and is presently a member of the American Antiquarian Society. He is a board-certified neurologist with a practice in Belleville, New Jersey. We met via Zoom to discuss why collecting magazines is so pleasurable, American magazines in particular. The discussion references Vogue, Life, Look, Harper's, Leslie's, Hearst's and many more iconic publications.

On this episode of The Biblio File Book Club Heather O'Neill and I discuss one of her favourite novels, Agota Kristof's The Notebook. This dark, fractured fairy tale of a story, told in simple, striking, visual language, describes the devastating impact of war on children and their families. Set in an unknown country during wartime it follows the lives of twin boys coping with life after they've been left by their mother to live with their dirty old grandmother. A dangerous weirdness ensues. We met at Le Figaro, a popular restaurant located in the Plateau neighbourhood of Montreal to talk about this disturbing, memorable work. Heather is a Canadian novelist, poet, short story writer, screenwriter and journalist, who published her debut novel, Lullabies for Little Criminals, in 2006. It won the Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction and the 2007 Canada Reads Competition. Other novels include The Girl Who Was Saturday Night and The Lonely Hearts Hotel. Her latest, When We Lost Our Heads, will be available on Feb. 1, 2022. Listen to the two of us as we compete for your attention with birds, trucks, screaming babies, and a tree full of cicadas.

Aimee Peake has been active in the antiquarian book business in Winnipeg for more than 20 years. She got her start as an apprentice to Michael Park, proprietor Greenfield Books. In 2000 she took over as manager of the newly-opened Bison Books, assuming sole proprietorship in 2010. In 2018 she purchased Greenfield and amalgamated it with Bison. You'll usually find Aimee in her bookshop on weekdays attending to customer needs and working on acquisitions, collections development and appraisals. Over the years she has exhibited books at fairs throughout North America, and in 2018 she participated in the ILAB Congress in Pasadena. Aimee is President of the Winnipeg Association of Secondhand Bookstores, and a board member of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of Canada. In addition to her work with Bison Books she also manages Dominion Auctions, a long-established Winnipeg-based art and antique auction house I visited her at her shop in downtown Winnipeg last month to find out what it was like to sell antiquarian books on the Prairies.

Jack David launched the publishing house ECW in 1974 as the journal Essays on Canadian Writing - from which came the E, the C, and the W. For the next ten years the company focused on scholarly projects and occasionally dabbled in more accessible trade books and biographies. The breakthrough came when it decided in the early 90s to publish books about non-literary folk, the key title being a biography of country singer k.d. lang. The book broke out in the American market and illustrated to ECW that it could be successful publishing trade titles with universal appeal. ECW has followe​d this literary/commercia​l path ever since. ​ "I love to be surprised," says Jack, "and I love to find myself reading something that I would never pick up in a bookstore (if any remain). In fact, I enjoy reading unsolicited proposals; I live in hope. I sometimes find myself reading a line or a passage to anyone who happens to be within earshot. I do this spontaneously because I like to share what I'm enjoying; and then I observe myself and register the fact that I want others to take pleasure in what I'm reading. That's the impetus for signing up a book." Ken Whyte knows magazine and newspaper publishing. He was editor-in-chief of Saturday Night Magazine, founding editor-in-chief of the National Post newspaper, editor-in-chief and publisher at Maclean's Magazine, and President of Rogers Publishing Company. He's an accomplished author having written The Uncrowned King: the Sensational Rise of William Randolph Hearst, a Washington Post, LA Times, and Globe & Mail book of the year; a groundbreaking biography of Herbert Hoover; and most recently, The Sack of Detroit: General Motors and the End of American Enterprise, a book which is currently creating quite a stir across North America. Additional interesting things about Ken: he's chairman of the board of the Donner Canada Foundation, one of Canada's leading philanthropic organizations. He sits on the board of the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, the National NewsMedia Council, the Digital Policy Forum, and the Frontier Institute. He is a member of the advisory committee of the Cundill Prize, the world's richest prize for historical non-fiction, and a governor of the Aurea Foundation, which funds public policy research in Canada. Several years ago he launched Sutherland House Books, a publishing house based in Toronto, Canada which has world dominating aspirations, plus he writes Shush, a weekly newsletter on the publishing business. I invited these two gentlemen to join me for a Zoom conversation about Canadian book publishing and the lessons it might offer the world.

Dr. Stephen Enniss is Director of the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. He has held previous appointments at the Folger Shakespeare Library and at Emory University's Rare Book Library. His research interests are in 20th century poetry, and he has written on Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, and Seamus Heaney, among others. He is the author of After the Titanic: A Life of Derek Mahon (Gill and Macmillan, 2014). The Harry Ransom Center is one of the great rare book libraries of the world. Not only does it possess many of the greatest books and manuscripts ever written, it also has an outstanding record of promoting and exhibiting them, and making them available to researchers and the public. I invited Stephen to participate with me, and a group of Canadian book collectors I've recently helped assemble (working title for the club: Bibliophiles North), in a discussion about how collectors can best go about establishing relationships with rare book libraries in hopes of selling or donating their collections

Meghan Constantinou has been Head Librarian at The Grolier Club since 2011 and a Club member since 2013. Her research interests include the history of private collecting, women's book ownership, and provenance studies. The Club Library collects, preserves, and makes accessible materials dedicated to the history and art of the book. Strengths of its collection include bibliographies, histories of printing and graphic processes, type specimens, fine and historic examples of printing, bookbinding, illustration, and, in particular, the literature of antiquarian book collecting and the book trade. I spoke with Meghan via Zoom about the Grolier's collection of private library catalogues, and asked her for advice, based on her lengthy study of the topic, on how collectors might best go about producing their own catalogues.

One of the best ways to become a successful, fulfilled antiquarian bookseller is to establish close, long-lasting relationships with enthusiastic, committed, ideally well-heeled, collectors. Justin Schiller is a pioneer in the field of rare, collectible children's books. During his career he has developed extraordinary bonds with many passionate book lovers. His efforts over the years with several of them have resulted in some of the world's best known children's book collections. We talk about how he and these treasured customers scaled mountains together.

Walter Lockhart Gordon (1906 – 1987) was a Canadian accountant, businessman, politician, and economic nationalist. Born in Toronto, he was educated at Upper Canada College and the Royal Military College of Canada in Kingston, Ontario. Upon graduation he joined the family accounting firm of Clarkson, Gordon and Company. During World War II he served in the Bank of Canada and the federal Ministry of Finance. In 1946, he chaired the Royal Commission on Administrative Classifications in the Public Service. From 1955 to 1957 he chaired the Royal Commission on Canada's Economic Prospects. The Commission's reports expressed concern about growing foreign ownership in the Canadian economy, particularly in the resource sector, and made recommendations to redress the problem. These were revisited by Gordon during his government career, notably in his poorly received budget of 1963. Gordon was Minister of Finance from 1963 to 1965 during Lester Pearson's first minority government. He quit in 1965, returned, and left for good in 1968. During his time in office he was responsible for the introduction of some of Canada's most important social programs. After leaving politics he returned to business but continued to argue, successfully, for economic nationalist causes. He published his political memoirs in 1977 and died in 1987. Stephen Azzi is one of the original core faculty members of the Clayton H. Riddell Graduate Program in Political Management at Carleton University. Prior to academia he worked as aide to four different members of Parliament. From 2005 to 2011 he was associate professor at Laurentian University where he taught US history and foreign policy. At Carleton he has taught in the Political Management program, the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs, the School of Canadian Studies, and the Departments of History, and Political Science. His research specialties are prime ministerial leadership in Canada, Canada–US relations, and Canadian economic and cultural nationalism. We met via Zoom, to talk Gordon, and to riff off Steve's book Walter Gordon and the Rise of Canadian Nationalism (MQUP, 1999)