The Biblio File hosted by Nigel Beale

Don Lindgren established Rabelais Books in 2006. The bookshop now operates out of Biddeford, Maine and specializes in Artists' Books, Cocktails, Cookbooks, Farm and Garden, Gastronomy, History of Food, Rare Periodicals, and Wine. We met years ago when I sought him out in Portland to talk about collecting cookbooks (Listen here). As we parted Don handed me a copy of his first Rabelais catalogue with the big salami on its cover. I've been intrigued with them (bookseller catalogues) ever since. Don has a sizeable collection, and whenever we get together we talk about them. Several months ago we decided to make it formal by devoting an episode of The Biblio File podcast to discussing the design and content of these great and various sales vehicles. I reached out to several booksellers, including Simon Beattie, Heather O'Donnell, Jonathan Hill, Glenn Horowitz, Mark Funke, Biblioctopus and Brian Cassidy, all of whom kindly send me examples of their outstanding work. Then Don and I got down to business.

According to his website, "In 1995, Bruce Batchelor rocked the publishing industry when he invented print-on-demand (POD) publishing and triggered a landslide of new books from every country in the world." Did he invent it? You'll have to listen to the podcast to find out. Since 1995, more than 1,000,000 writers, says Bruce, "have seized the opportunity to be published through services such as Agio (his small publishing consultancy firm), Author Services, Kindle Direct Publishing and many other publishing houses." Bruce was CEO of Trafford Publishing for11 years, and is now owner/publisher at Agio Publishing House in Victoria, BC, Canada. He's a "bestselling" author and management consultant, and speaks at various writer and academic conferences. We talk here about the explosion in self-publishing that occurred during the 1990s, and the role that he and Trafford Publishing played in it.

"Ursula Nordstrom (1910 - 1988) was publisher and editor-in-chief of juvenile books at Harper & Row from 1940 to 1973. She is credited with presiding over a transformation in children's literature in which morality tales written for adult approval gave way to works that instead appealed to children's imaginations and emotions." She authored the 1960 children's book The Secret Language, and a collection of her correspondence, edited by Leonard Marcus, entitled Dear Genius: the Letters of Ursula Nordstrom was published in 1998. Harper's received three Newbery Medals and two Caldecott Medals during Nordstom's tenure. She edited some of the milestones of children's literature, including E. B. White's Stuart Little (1945) and Charlotte's Web (1952), Margaret Wise Brown's Goodnight Moon (1947), Crockett Johnson's Harold and the Purple Crayon (1955), and Syd Hoff's Danny and the Dinosaur (1958). Other authors she edited included Laura Ingalls Wilder, Ruth Krauss, and Charlotte Zolotow. I talk to Leonard Marcus about everything Ursula. Photo credit: Sonya Sones.

Marion Sinclair has been Chief Executive of Publishing Scotland since 2008, with responsibility for program management, funding bids, policy, the International Publishing Fellowship program, publishing practice issues and reporting to Creative Scotland. She has worked in the book publishing sector for more than 30 years, at Polygon from 1988-97 (awarded Sunday Times UK Small Publisher of the Year in 1993) then as a university lecturer in publishing, before joining PS in 2003. Marion is also a board member of the Gaelic Books Council (ex-officio), of the book distributor BookSource, and Literature Alliance Scotland, she's also a committee member of the Sabhal Mor Ostaig Library Advisory Group, and Saltire Society Publisher of the Year panel. We met via Zoom to talk about what Publishing Scotland does to help Scottish publishers. Towards the end of our conversation I try to wheedle some advice out of Marion for Canada.

Conrad Black - in full, Conrad Moffat Black, Lord Black of Crossharbour - was born in 1944, in Montreal. He is an author, columnist, historian, and businessman who built the third largest newspaper group in the world during the 1980s and 1990s. At its height the organization controlled nearly 250 newspapers including the London Daily Telegraph, the Fairfax Group in Australia, The Jerusalem Post, Southam Press in Canada, and the Chicago Sun-Times. Black studied history and political science at Carleton University in Ottawa, earned a law degree from Laval University in 1970, and a Masters degree in history from McGill University in 1973. For his thesis he wrote a biography of former Quebec premier Maurice Duplessis; published in 1977, it came to be considered a definitive work. He entered the newspaper business in 1967 as part owner of two small Quebec weeklies, on the way to establishing his media empire. He currently lives in Toronto with his wife Barbara Amiel. W​e met via Zoom to talk about his various book and model ship collections, Napoleon, Roosevelt, his collecting habits, and his long-term fulfilling relationship with books. First off however he vigorously defends himself against charges that were successfully levelled against him by U.S. federal prosecutors in the mid-2000s.

John Brookshire Thompson is a British sociologist, a professor at the University of Cambridge, and a fellow of Jesus College. His work over the past two decades has focused particularly on the publishing industry. Books in the Digital Age: The Transformation of Academic and Higher Education Publishing in Britain and the United States (Polity, 2005) presents an analysis of higher education publishing from 1980 to 2005. Much of the analysis is based on industry interviews made on condition of anonymity. His Merchants of Culture (Polity, 2009) covers in a similar way, the entire publishing and bookselling industry from the 1960s to 2008. We talk here about his latest book Book Wars: The Digital Revolution in Publishing (Polity, 2021) which tells the story of book publishing's wild ride over the past decade - the surge of e-books, the self-publishing explosion and the growing popularity of audiobooks - plus successful and failed attempts to create new businesses in this space. It's a comprehensive, dense (in a good way) human read; and, if you love books as I do, an extremely entertaining way to spend 15 hours or so.

Ruth Panofsky is Professor of English at Ryerson University in Toronto. She is a leading scholar of the history of publishing and authorship in Canada and Canadian Jewish literature, an award-winning poet and a Fellow of the Royal Society. We met via Zoom to discuss her most recent book Toronto Trailblazers: Women in Canadian Publishing (2019, U of T Press) which explores the influence of seven women who helped advance a modern literary culture in Canada. "Publisher Irene Clarke, scholarly editors Eleanor Harman and Francess Halpenny, trade editors Sybil Hutchinson, Claire Pratt, and Anna Porter, and literary agent Bella Pomer made the most of their vocational prospects, first by securing their respective positions and then by refining their professional methods. Individually, each woman asserted her agency by adapting orthodox ways of working within Canadian publishing. Collectively, their overarching approach emerged as a feminist practice. Through their vision and method these trailblazing women disrupted the dominant masculine paradigm and helped transform publishing practice in Canada." We talk about writing these women back into the history of Canadian publishing, and end off with a look at the challenges that face Canada's current book publishing industry.

Dwight Garner is an American journalist and a longtime writer and editor for the New York Times. In 2008, he was named a book critic for the newspaper. Garner's previous post at The New York Times was as senior editor of The New York Times Book Review, where he worked from 1999 to 2008. He was a founding editor of Salon.com where he worked from 1995 to 1998. Garner now lives, or will shortly live, in New Orleans. He is married to Cree LeFavour, author of the memoir Lights On, Rats Out and several acclaimed cookbooks. His most recent book is called Garner's Quotations: A Modern Miscellany. We met via Zoom to talk about his book Read Me: A Century of Classic American Book Advertisements.

Mark Samuels Lasner is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Delaware Library, and one of the world's great book collectors. The Mark Samuels Lasner Collection focuses on British literature and art from 1850 to 1900, with an emphasis on the Pre-Raphaelites and writers and illustrators of the 1890s. It comprises more than 9,500 books, letters, manuscripts, photographs, ephemera, and artworks, including many items signed by such figures as Oscar Wilde, George Eliot, Max Beerbohm, William Morris, Christina and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Aubrey Beardsley. In 2016 Mark donated his collection, worth more than $10 million, to the University of Delaware. It's the largest and most valuable gift in the Library's history. We connected via Zoom to talk about Mark's childhood and his incipient interest in England and the late Victorian period, his early book collecting - the how and why of it - the extraordinarily talented and well dressed essayist, caricaturist, and critic Max Beerbohm; fun, friendships, favourite booksellers, fashion and much more.

David Frum is a Canadian-American political commentator and a senior editor at The Atlantic. He is the author of ten books, most recently TRUMPOCALYPSE: Restoring American Democracy (HarperCollins, 2020). His first book, Dead Right, won praise from William F. Buckley as "the most refreshing intellectual experience in a generation" and from Frank Rich in the New York Times as "the smartest book written from the inside about the American conservative movement." He is a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush, and authored the first book about Bush's presidency written by a former member of the administration. As a young man he was enamored with C.S. Forester's Hornblower stories. Together we examined two of them for The Biblio File Book Club. Listen as we talk about rice, morals, codes, lying, punishment, being true to yourself, normal lives, leadership, and the Mafia, among other things.

Odette Drapeau is a leader, educator and innovator in the practice of fine bookbinding. She founded her bookbinding workshop The Headband in Montreal in 1979. For more than 50 years she has refined her work though the innovative use of materials including fish leathers, high-tech fibres and LED lights. Through her creative use of stunning textures and colours she has achieved a level of excellence that has been widely heralded, including, most recently by The Alcuin Society which bestowed its Robert R. Reid Award for lifetime achievement in the book arts in Canada upon her. Odette is a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Art, and was head of the Association of Quebec Bookbinders between 1988-91. She has exhibited at solo and group shows more than fifty times at venues in Europe, Canada and the United States. We talk here about her long, accomplished career, her thoughts about "the book," and her work philosophy.

Only seventeen women have won the Nobel Prize for Literature since it started in 1901. That's 17 out of 119 winners. In order to rectify this imbalance, an important new prize has been established. The Carol Shields Prize for Fiction is "the first English-language literary award to celebrate creativity and excellence in fiction by women writers in the United States and Canada." I wanted to learn more about Carol Shields, so I read Startle and Illuminate, Carol Shields on Writing and interviewed one of its editors, Anne Giardini, who also happens to be Carol's daughter in addition to being a writer, and Chancellor of Simon Fraser University. Startle and Illuminate is culled from decades worth of Carol's correspondence, essays, notes, comments, criticism and lectures, and drawn together by Anne and her son Nicholas. Anne and I talk here about, among other things, Carol's thoughts and advice on the craft of writing; redemption; Carol's voice on the page and in the air; the existence of ordinary, boring people; the invisibility of women's lives; group courage; rootedness; and candles matching housecoats.

Dan Mozersky enjoyed a long and fruitful career in Canada's retail book industry. As a founding member of Indigo Books & Music's executive team he was instrumental in turning the company's vision into reality. During the 1990s he served as manager of U.S. Operations for Classic Books in New York. Prior to this he founded and owned a chain of retail bookstores in Ottawa and Montreal. Active in the Canadian Booksellers Association (CBA), he served as director, vice president, and chair of various industry committees. In 1985 he was recognized by the Canadian Book Publishers' Professional Association as bookseller of the year. We talk here in Part ll of our conversation about Dan's work with the CBA, and how he helped establish Indigo Books, Canada's largest chain of big box bookstores.

Bill Waiser is a western Canadian historian. He has published more than a dozen books– many of them prize-winning. A World We Have Lost: Saskatchewan Before 1905, for example, won the 2016 Governor General's Literary Award for Non-Fiction. Bill has been appointed to the Order of Canada, awarded the Saskatchewan Order of Merit, elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, named a distinguished university professor, and granted a D.Litt. He was the 2018 recipient of the Royal Society of Canada J.B. Tyrrell medal, presented for "outstanding work" in Canadian history, as well as the 2018 Governor General's History Award for Popular Media: The Pierre Berton Award. We talk about his most recent book In Search of Almighty Voice, Resistance and Reconciliation (Fifth House, 2020), about the life of Almighty Voice - a member of the One Arrow Willow Cree who died violently at the hands of Canada's North-West Mounted Police in 1897 - and how his violent death spawned a succession of conflicting stories — in newspapers, magazines, pulp fiction, plays and film; about how history is written and re-written, and why an 'accurate' depiction of the life and death of Almighty Voice matters. Clarification: According to Statscan indigenous people make up 4.9% of Canada's population, 16.3% of Saskatchewan's population.

Matt Dorfman is an internationally recognized designer and illustrator. He is the art director of the New York Times Book Review and former art director of the New York Times Op-Ed page. Additionally, he maintains a one-person office specializing in work for publishers, film, theater and various cultural institutions. I talked with Matt recently about his selection of the best book covers of 2020 for the New York Times Book Review - dissecting his decision-making process and judgement calls. Among other things we discuss the differences between designing the book review and op-ed sections, the delays between creating a jacket design and it appearing in public, dust jackets capturing zeitgeists, the tension between commerce and art, the power of jealousy, gateway drugs John Gall, David Pearson, and Roy Kuhlman, being haunted by Barbara de Wilde, Carin Goldberg, and Louise Fili, collecting dust jackets, how much our wives hate books, and visual literacy.

Novelist, screenwriter and essayist Larry McMurtry is best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning 1985 novel Lonesome Dove, a sweeping historical epic that follows ex-Texas Rangers as they drive cattle from the Rio Grande to Montana. (Update: Larry died yesterday, March 25, 2021). He grew up on a ranch outside of Archer City, Texas, which is the model for his fictional town of Thalia. A book collector, McMurtry purchased a rare book store in Washington, D.C.'s Georgetown neighbourhood in 1970 and named it Booked Up. In 1988 he opened a second Booked Up in Archer City, establishing the town as a "Book City." This store is arguably the largest single used bookstore in the United States, carrying somewhere between 400,000 and 450,000 titles. McMurtry is well-known for the film adaptations of his work, especially Hud (from the novel Horseman, Pass By), The Last Picture Show; James L. Brooks's Terms of Endearment, and Lonesome Dove, which became an enormously popular television mini-series. In 2006, he was co-winner (with Diana Ossana) of both the Best Screenplay Golden Globe and the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for Brokeback Mountain. I interviewed him ( in 2008) as part of a project I was working on for the Canadian Booksellers Association. We talk about his latest, Books: A Memoir, his life as a book rancher, having the right books, junk, the fun of the hunt, book-scouting, catalogues, bookstores and cultural vitality, keeping stock fresh, burning out on fiction and movies, the declining number of used book stores, and optimism for the future.

Richard Nash is a coach, strategist, and serial entrepreneur. He led partnerships and content at the culture discovery start-up Small Demons and the new media app Byliner. Previously he ran independent publishers Soft Skull Press and Red Lemonade where he published Maggie Nelson, Lynne Tillman, Vanessa Veselka's Zazen, Alain Mabanckou, and many others. He was awarded the Association of American Publishers' Award for Creativity in Independent Publishing in 2005. We met via Zoom (as I'm sure you'll be able to tell) to talk more about his article 'What is the Business of Literature?', about where publishing has been, technology and "the shock of the old," repurposing technology, essential reading, the influence of capitalism on publishing, copyright, great books not seeing the light of day, dance floors, reading, and the richness of book history.

Will Schwalbe has spent most of his life in publishing: at William Morrow, and then at Hyperion, where he was Editor in Chief. In January 2008 he left Hyperion to found a startup called Cookstr.com and ran that for six years. It's now part of Macmillan Publishers, where he has worked since 2014. His books include Send: Why People Email So Badly and How to Do it Better with his friend David Shipley. The End of Your Life Book Club, about the books he read with his mother when she was dying. And Books For Living, about the role books can play in our lives and how they can show us how to live each day more fully and with more meaning. He lives in New York City with his husband David Cheng In addition to Books for Living, we talk about Faber, Sonny Mehta, Rohinton Mistry, reasons for reading, adults reading to children - and their conversations, greater powers, book clubs, cook books, Christopher Isherwood, giving and sharing conversations about books for birthdays, tyranny, and my new venture, Literary Retreats.

Since 2012, Jason Rovito has been working with institutional and private collectors to grow the documentary value of their collections "because the Cloud forgets." Subject strengths include: the avant-garde, design, the human sciences, and visual culture across the full spectrum of Special Collections formats: rare books, ephemera, manuscripts, photographs, prints, audio/visual materials, and archives. Jason is a member of the International League of Antiquarian Booksellers (ILAB), the Antiquarian Booksellers' Association of Canada (ABAC), and the Ephemera Society of America (ESA), and is committed to their codes of ethics. Based in Toronto, he regularly exhibits at fairs in New York, Toronto, and London. Jason has been touted by many as one of the talented "new antiquarians" who are discerning value in all sorts of interesting and unusual places. We talk about this entrepreneurial tradition among successful bookseller down the ages; about Italy, and prisons, and virtual book fairs, and much more.

Marc Côté is President of Cormorant Books, a literary publishing house noted for its discovery and development of Canadian writing talent and the publishing of Quebecois fiction translated into English. He has won Canada's Libris Award for editor of the year twice, and Cormorant has won the Libris Award for small presses three times. At Cormorant Marc has acquired and edited many award-nominated books. The Great Gatsby is a novel written by F. Scott Fitzgerald, published by Scribner's in 1925. Set in the Jazz Age on Long Island it depicts narrator Nick Carraway's relationship with mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby, and Gatsby's obsessive desire to reunite with his former lover Daisy Buchanan. The Biblio File Book Club is series of book discussions with smart people about books that they believe are important; books they would recommend to loved ones...books they consider to be essential reading. Zoom wasn't behaving very well during our conversation, so apologies for the irritating distortions, etc.

Richard Ovenden ​has been ​Bodley's Librarian (the senior executive position of the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford) since 2014. ​He is a ​ Fellow​ at the​ Society of Antiquaries and Royal Society of Arts; ​a ​​member​ of the American Philosophical Society; Treasurer, ​at ​the Consortium of European Research Libraries; ​and ​President​ ​of ​the Digital Preservation Coalition. ​He was ​​awarded the OBE by The Queen in 2019.​ And almost as big a deal, he joined me recently on Zoom to talk about his new book, Burning the Books, a history of the deliberate destruction of knowledge; about the threats to libraries past and present; about fire, war, violence, obsolescence, complacency and underfunding. And about the fragility of libraries, and their fundamental importance to democracy, to truth and facts, to the rule of law, in short, to our treasured Western way of life.

Dan Mozersky enjoyed a long and fruitful career in the retail book industry. As a founding member of Indigo Books & Music's executive team he was instrumental in turning the company's vision into reality ( we talk about this in Part ll of our conversation). During the 1990s he served as manager of U.S. Operations for Classic Books in New York. Prior to this he founded and owned a chain of retail bookstores in Ottawa and Montreal. Active in the Canadian Booksellers Association, he served as director, vice president, and chair of various industry committees. In 1985 he was recognized by the Canadian Book Publishers' Professional Association as bookseller of the year. We talk here in Part l of our conversation about how Dan built his successful chain of bricks and mortar bookstores.

Mary Newberry is a Toronto-based freelance editor, indexer, and teacher. Her early passion was dancing. The self-discipline she learned from it is today one of her greatest assets. She works mostly with humanities-related texts: academic, government, literary, creative arts and general interest, and lately, in memoir. She has a long-term relationship with social justice and diversity, and enjoys working in these areas. Scholarly editing is one of her specialties. She enjoys complex materials, helping to bring clarity and concision to emerging ideas. She often works with scholars for whom English is an additional language, and teaches indexing in a course she developed for Ryerson University's Publishing Program. In 2016, she won the Ewart-Daveluy Award for excellence in indexing. We talk here about the history and practice of indexing, looking specifically at her notable work on Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report, in addition to several of her award-winning books.

The son of prominent book collector Kenneth E. Hill, Jonathan A. Hill grew up in a house filled with old books. After graduating from university in 1974 he served a classic apprenticeship, working for four leading antiquarian booksellers in San Francisco, New York, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles. In 1978 he started his own company and has specialized in science, medicine, natural history, bibliography and the history of book collecting, and early printed books. For the past 20 years he has, partnering with his wife Megumi, also sold antiquarian Japanese, Chinese, and Korean illustrated books, manuscripts, and scrolls. During the past 43 years the company has issued more than 230 catalogues devoted to these various subjects. It is thanks to them that I contacted Jonathan. We talk here about his (and Jerry Kelly's) impressive work, and about bookseller catalogues in general.

Miriam Borden, a teacher of Yiddish and PhD Candidate at the University of Toronto, is winner of the 2020 Honey and Wax Book Collecting Prize for "Building a Nation of Little Readers: Twentieth-Century Yiddish Primers and Workbooks for Children." Borden collects twentieth-century Yiddish educational materials. Language primers form the core of her collection which also includes songbooks and workbooks, flash cards, and scripts from school plays. These artifacts testify to a once-thriving Yiddish school system across North America, a network that collapsed after World War II as Jewish immigrants assimilated and Hebrew emerged as the language of the State of Israel. As a teacher of Yiddish, Borden now uses these vintage materials to instruct adults hoping to reconnect with a lost part of their heritage. This from her winning essay: "There was no heirloom china in the house where I grew up, no silver from grandmother's chest to be taken out and polished for holidays and family celebrations. That china had all been shattered, the silver stolen. . .The heirlooms, and most of the family, were lost. But that does not mean I am bereft of inheritance. I was raised with an heirloom language, a treasure that could be taken out and polished and used on those rare moments when no word in English or Polish or Hebrew would fit the occasion. I was raised to speak the language of the dead. But never for a moment did it ever dawn on me that it was a dead language." Miriam's collection represents "an impressive effort of historical preservation and an inspiring example of how a collection that began as something personal becomes a collective resource," said the Prize judges. You can read her winning essay and bibliography here.

Martin Latham has been a bookseller for thirty-five years. He has a PhD in Indian history, and taught at Hertfordshire University before turning to bookselling. He is proud to be responsible for the biggest petty-cash claim in Waterstones' history, when he paid for the excavation of a Roman bath-house floor under his bookshop. Martin's books include Kent's Strangest Tales, Londonopolis, and most recently The Bookseller's Tale which we talk about in this episode. It's really a book full of tales about books of course, and bookstores, libraries, chapbooks, marginalia, women readers and collectors - chock full of fascinating biblio adventures. I highly recommend it.

The Bookshelf bookshop in Guelph, Ontario was established in 1973 by Barb and Doug Minett. In 1980 it became The Bookshelf Cafe - Canada's first bookstore cafe/restaurant. Shortly thereafter an ambitious plan was conceived to add a cinema and bar to what was then the roof of the building. During implementation, University of Guelph physics professor and longtime customer, Jim Hunt, trained a team of 10 cafe servers and booksellers in the art & science of 35mm projection. In 1988 The Bookshelf Cinema showed its first film. Over 20,000 shows and 1,000,000 cinema goers later, the cinema continues to offer 14-15 shows a week with its fancy digital projection and great sound system. Shortly thereafter bookshelf.ca (Canada's first full-service online bookstore - sold to Indigo in the late 90s) was launched. The Bookshelf team also embarked on "the great leap sideways" expanding all aspects of the emporium by re-building the building next door and adding a music venue: the eBar. Many great Canadian musical talents have graced the eBar stage. The bar serves up great craft beers and dj's and dancing every Saturday night. Over the years The Bookshelf has operated a number of food and beverage operations - originally with its own staff and later in collaboration with others. In 2015 The Bookshelf welcomed Miijidaa ("Let's Eat") as its restaurant collaborator. My conversation with Doug Minett starts with him in Europe, with his future wife Barb, the year prior to their setting up shop, and ends with discussion of cibabooks.ca and Doug's role as acting Executive Director.

It was on Twitter a couple of months ago that I noticed this tweet celebrating the work of one Bianca Gillam (@BinxGillam). 'You're the best special sales assistant ever', it said, or words to that effect. Hmm I thought. What, I wonder, does a special sales assistant do at a publishing house - I'd noticed that she worked at Simon & Schuster ( @simonschusterUK ). I wasn't sure. So I tweeted at Bianca, inviting her to appear on the podcast to explain just exactly what she does.

Last year at about this time David Gilmour and I sat down together to talk about "Mojave" one of Truman Capote's greatest short stories. We enjoyed ourselves so much we decided to do it again, this time with "Shut a Final Door." Capote wrote this story when he was only 23 years old. David contends that it strongly foreshadows how Truman's actual life would unfold - as a slow, messy descent into hell. Perfect fare for the holiday season. Merry Christmas everyone. Thanks for listening! Photo by Jack Mitchell

Virago is a London-based British publishing company committed to publishing women's writing and books on "feminist" topics. Established by women in the 1970s in tandem with the Women's Liberation Movement (WLM), Virago has done much to address inequitable gender dynamics in the publishing world, and, unlike anti-capitalist publishing ventures, has branded itself a commercial alternative in a male dominated publishing industry, seeking to compete with mainstream international presses. Initially known as Spare Rib Books, Virago was founded by Carmen Callil in 1973 primarily to publish books by women writers. From the get-go the company sought two sorts of books: original works, and out-of-print books by neglected female writers. The latter were reissued under the "Modern Classics" label, which launched in 1978 In 1982, Virago became a wholly owned subsidiary Random House, USA, but in 1987 Callil, Lennie Goodings and others put together a management buy-out. After a downturn in the market, the board decided to sell Virago to Little, Brown, of which Virago became an imprint in 1996 (with Lennie as Publisher). In 2006, Virago became part of the Hachette publishing group with Lennie acting as editor and publisher. She is now Chair of Virago. Today the company's stated mission is to "champion women's voices and bring them to the widest possible readership around the world. From fiction and politics to history and classic children's stories, its writers continue to win acclaim, break new ground and enrich the lives of readers." I met Lennie via Zoom to talk about her life with Virago, as described in her new memoir A Bite of the Apple, published by OUP around the world, and by mighty Biblioasis in Canada.

Martin Amis was born in Oxford in 1949 and is a British novelist, essayist, and memoirist - all of whom show up to contribute to his latest novel, Inside Story. As it happens I read Lolita in tandem with Inside Story, so the front-end of our conversation is laden with nasty Nabokovian-related questions. Since Vladimir, along with Saul Bellow, has heavily influenced Martin's writing over the years, I decided this was fair game. Amis is best known for his novels Money (1984) and London Fields (1989). He received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his memoir Experience and has been nominated for the Booker Prize twice (shortlist for Time's Arrow and longlist for Yellow Dog). He served as Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Manchester until 2011, and is considered one of the most influential novelists of our times. We met via Zoom to talk about everything he throws into this novel, plus the way he frames it. Nabokov looms large, as I say, as does Christopher Hitchens, and, towards the end, ketchup and relish. Like many of Amis's other works, Inside Story contains plenty of very good laughs - one pretty well every 3-4 pages (in between, I frequently caught myself wearing a wide smirk). There's a lot to be said for this, and for some genuinely beautiful writing in the novel, particularly about Israel; plus there's a fair amount of engaging literary criticism. In short, it's well worth spending time with this excellent hybrid; as, I hope you'll agree, it is with this interview... It starts mid-sentence, with the two of us talking about Chip Kidd's dust jacket design.

"Martin Parr's celebrated photographs bridge the divide between art and documentary photography. His studies of the idiosyncrasies of mass culture and consumerism around the world, his innovative imagery, and his prolific output have placed him firmly at the forefront of contemporary art. He is an avid collector and maker of photobooks. His own photobooks include The Last Resort (1986), Common Sense (iggg) and Boring Postcards (Phaidon Press, 1999), and he is the subject of the monograph Martin Parr by Val Williams (Phaidon Press, 2002)." Together with Gerry Badger he is the co-author of The Photobook: A History, a beautiful three-volume set of books that offer an engrossing, admittedly subjective survey of the "best" photography books ever published, beginning with early experiments in the medium in mid-19yh-century England and ending with "raucous Japanese photo-diaries of the 1990s." I question Martin about his collection criteria - how he arrived at "best," and how various artistic and social movements influenced the look and content of photobooks over the decades.

...in which I posit that raising funds is a primary motivator explaining why scientists write, and Lawrence disagrees; and the two of us argue over the similarities and differences between art and science... The combatants tend to confuse human-made with nature-made art, and possibly don't even actually disagree, if we're talking big picture. Anyway, the conversation is lively, if nothing else. Throughout the episode we reference Lawrence's entertaining, readable book The Greatest Story Ever Told—So Far. It "deals with the current scientific understanding of the creation of the Universe and gives a history of how scientists have formulated the Standard Model of Particle Physics. Lawrence Krauss is a writer and an American-Canadian theoretical physicist and cosmologist who has over the years taught at Arizona State University, Yale University, and Case Western Reserve University. He founded ASU's Origins Project, now called ASU Interplanetary Initiative, to investigate fundamental questions about the universe, and served as it's director. He retired in May 2019 and is currently President of The Origins Project Foundation and host of The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss.

Patrick McGahern has been operating an antiquarian bookshop in Ottawa, Canada's capital, since 1969. Today it continues to thrive under the management of Patrick's son Liam. The store specializes in Used and Rare Books, Canadiana, Americana, Arctic, Antarctic, Travel, Natural History & Voyages, Illustrated & Plate Books, Rare Books, Irish and Scottish History and Literature. I met Patrick via Zoom to celebrate his 51 years in business, to try to learn some of what he's learned over the years, and to talk about some of the more colourful bookseller colleagues in the trade, including Grant Woolmer, Jerry Sherlock and Bernard Amtmann

Roger Chartier​ was born​ in 1945 in Lyon, ​France. He is a giant in the field of ​book​ history ​and the study of ​publishing and reading.​ He teaches at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, the Collège de France, and the University of Pennsylvania.​ ​ I interviewed Roger via Zoom in hopes of determining exactly why he's a giant, who's shoulders he stands on, and what he has contributed to the study of book history. Among other things we talk about Roger's book of essays The Author's Hand and the Printer's Mind; Shakespeare and Cervantes; the importance of material texts to history; forms of reading; the codex; translation; intermediaries between the reader and the writer; the commonplace technique; Roland Barthes; reader appropriation; author intention; Marshall McLuhan; D.F. McKenzie's Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts; Robert Darnton; The History of the Book in France; IMEC; maps in fiction; "Sprezzatura​;" ​and literature and the consecration of the life and manuscripts of the writer.

Toby Faber grew up with Faber & Faber - its books and stories have played an important role in his life. He was the company's managing director for four years and remains a non-executive director and chairman of sister company Faber Music. He has written two celebrated works of non-fiction, Stradivarius and Fabergé 's Eggs. His first novel, Close to the Edge, was published by Muswell Press in 2019. He lives in London with his wife and two daughters. We met via Zoom to talk about his book Faber & Faber: The Untold Story. Toby tells the story in the words of those who founded and worked for the company during the 20th century. One of founder Geoffrey Faber (Toby's grandfather)'s great strengths, he says, was recruitment. ​Toby provides me with verbal sketches of many of those recruited to the firm, including T.S. Eliot, Morley Kennerley, Frank Morley, Richard de la Mare, Charles Monteith, Robert McCrum and others. In addition to tracing the history of Faber we look at some of the reasons why it continues to thrive as an independent company, including the fact that, years ago, it chose to maintain control of publishing its own paperback editions of backlist titles.

Powell's Books is a chain of bookstores located in and around Portland, Oregon. It claims to be the largest independent new and used bookstore in the world. Powell's 'City of Books' store is located on the edge of downtown and occupies a full city block. It covers some 68,000 square feet or 1.6 acres of retail floor space. Emily Powell is a third generation owner of the bookstore. She made headlines this past August for dumping Amazon as a sales partner. To mark "Independent Bookstore Day" she announced that "we will no longer sell our books on Amazon's marketplace. For too long, we have watched the detrimental impact of Amazon's business on our communities and the independent bookselling world." "The vitality of our neighbors and neighborhoods depends on the ability of local businesses to thrive," she continued. "We will not participate in undermining that vitality." I talked to her recently, via Zoom, about her stand against Amazon, her storied bookstore and the reasons for its successes and longevity.

Tiphaine Guillermou is an editor with Graphéine, a design agency with offices in Paris and Lyon. While researching 20th century French book design - so that I'd have some books to hunt down while visiting bookstores in France - I came across a terrific article Tiphaine had written for Graphéine's blog, here. It was exactly what I was looking for - filled with all sorts of great book collecting leads. I was so impressed with the article I decided to interview Tiphaine about it. Listen as we talk about Pierre Faucheux, Robert Massin, Gallimard, Stock, Whites and Yellows, Scorpion, the French Book Club, Le Livre de Poche, Folio, Monsieur Toussaint Louverture, Cent Pages editions,David Pearson, Zulma and much more.

Andy Hunter is the founder and CEO of Bookshop.org He's also the publisher at Catapult, at Counterpoint and at Softskull, and, as if this isn't enough, publisher and co-creator at LitHub, and co-founder and chairman at Electric Literature. Despite all of these responsibilities, Andy took the time to talk via Zoom about his latest venture and how to use it to help support indie bookstores, and, at the same time, stick it to Amazon. Bookshop.org is "an online book marketplace designed to support independent bookstores." Among other things the two of us discuss how authors, publishers, reviewers, bloggers and others in the book publishing ecosystem can sign up as Bookshop.org affiliates and make 10% of the price of books sold on their sites (as opposed to 4.5% from Amazon); about Bookshop.org's huge selection of books shipping directly from the wholesaler and being delivered in 2-3 days; about physically touching paper pages and petting cats in brick and mortar bookshops; about the smells and sounds and conversations and coffee that can be had in real bookstores; about revitalizing downtowns; about the magic of reading; and about helping to ensure that all of this continues to be a thing. According to Andy, Bookshop.org will be launching in Canada in the Spring of 2021.

Benoit Forgeot is one of France's leading antiquarian book dealers. We met in his office, in the Odeon district of Paris to talk about what differentiates French collectors from American; French book binders; secrets; coffee; the manuscript market ( good time to buy); Paul Bonet, coffee again; business in Paris versus the provinces; the crucial knowledge that American curators impart, and much more, (includes Parisian street sounds).

Anne-Solange Noble has been International Rights Manager at Gallimard since 1992. She was born and raised in Montreal, Canada and graduated from McGill University in Hispanic Literature. After spending two years in Mexico she went to Paris where she studied International Relations at the Institut d'Études Politiques de Paris. In 1985 she landed a job in rights negotiations with Flammarion. Seven years later she moved to Gallimard to do the same thing, and has been there ever since. Recently her focus has been on licensing English-language rights for Gallimard fiction and non-fiction to American and British publishers. We met at her offices in the Rive Gauche district of Paris to talk about her role, and the obstacles she's faced selling into these English markets over the past three decades.

Lifted from Bill Samuel's website: Itinerant one-time chartered accountant who has lived in Denmark, East Africa, the Gulf (Arabian/Persian, not Texan) and the Caribbean with shorter stints in Eastern Europe and various rather nice small islands. Born in England into a family with an international outlook, an interest in people and a feeling for the cultural side of life. William Foyle, one of the greatest booksellers, and book collectors, of the twentieth century was his grandfather. Bill inherited a passion for books and​ his life ​has largely been ​shaped by those ​he read as a child, which gave ​him a desire to see as much of this wonderful world of ours as​ he could​. ​As for what he's done: ​more or less chronologically: auditing in London and Copenhagen, tourism stuff in Kenya, house building in Portugal, financial consultancy in the UK and the Gulf, Executive Director of an investment bank in Bahrain, Director of Tourism and Superintendent of Offshore Finance in the Turks and Caicos Islands, commercial advisor to the government of St. Helena and Vice Chairman of ​his family business, Foyles bookshop​, which he wrote about in An Accidental Bookseller, A Personal Memoir of Foyles, and which we talk about in this episode of The Biblio File podcast​. We met in the garden of a villa near the town of Condom, in southern France. The weather was perfect.

John Freeman is an American writer and a literary critic. He was the editor of Granta from 2009 to 2013, and is a former president of the National Book Critics Circle. His writing has appeared in more than 200 English-language publications around the world and he currently edits a series of anthologies of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry entitled Freeman's, published in partnership with Grove/Atlantic and The New School. Reason enough, I figured, to want to talk to him about the role of the editor. His second book, a collection of his interviews with major contemporary writers titled How to Read a Novelist, was published in the U.S. in 2013 by FSG and features profiles of Margaret Atwood, John Updike, Geoff Dyer, Toni Morrison, Haruki Murakami, and others. It's the reason I wanted to talk to him about interviewing authors (plus the fact that I've watched him skillfully question authors on stage - well on Youtube - many times). During his time with the National Book Critics Circle, John launched a campaign to raise awareness of the cutbacks in book coverage by the U.S. national print media and to save book review sections. We talk about how this effort resulted in the establishment of Literary Hub.

Kenneth White is the founder of Sutherland House Books. He is the former editor-in-chief of Saturday Night Magazine, the founding editor of The National Post, and the former editor and publisher of Maclean's magazine. He was president of Rogers Publishing, Canada's largest magazine company, and the founding president of Next Issue Canada (now Texture), in partnership with Conde Nast, Meredith, Hearst, and Time Inc. Mr. Whyte is the author of The Uncrowned King: The Sensational Rise of William Randolph Hearst (2008, Random House), In 2017, he published Hoover: An Extraordinary Life in Extraordinary Times (Knopf), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Last month he launched a suicidal assault on libraries in a 3500-word article in The Globe and Mail newspaper. In it he posits, among other things, that: there are three times as many books borrowed as bought in the United States every year, and four times as many in Canada; that libraries don't passively lend books, they compete with booksellers by advertising how much people can save by borrowing rather than buying books, and they compete among themselves to lend the most books possible; and that most public library lending is of books read for entertainment, not edification, by people who can afford to pay for books. We talked about his article via Zoom.

Jael Richardson is the author of The Stone Thrower: A Daughter's Lesson, a Father's Life, a memoir exploring her relationship with her father, CFL quarterback Chuck Ealey. It was adapted into a children's book in 2016. Richardson is a book columnist and guest host on CBC's q. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph and lives in Brampton, Ontario where she founded and serves as the Artistic Director for the Festival of Literary Diversity (FOLD). Her debut novel, Gutter Child, is coming out in January 2021 with HarperCollins Canada. Jael's recent tweet about Canadian children's book publishers being racist caught my attention, and we agreed to talk about it via Zoom. During the second half of our conversation I present some of the feedback I received from Canadian publishers about the Tweet. During the first Jael talks about her memoir, life with her father, being black in Canada and the feeling of being lost. Among her key points: diversified hiring practices are good for business, it's important for young black students to meet black authors, and publishers should pay attention to who's making the money off the stories they choose to publish. (Please accept my apologies for the annoying keyboard tapping sounds that occur at times during the course of the conversation. No idea why they're there. Perhaps it's the Russians trying to wreak havoc with the show, who knows).

Pierre Assouline is a French writer and journalist. He was born in Casablanca, Morocco and has published several novels. He has written biographies of, among others, the legendary photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson; Hergé, the creator of The Adventures of Tintin; Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, the art dealer, and Georges Simenon, the detective novelist and creator of Inspector Maigret. As a journalist, Assouline has worked for some of France's leading publications, including Lire and Le Nouvel Observateur. He also publishes a popular blog, "La république des livres." A number of his biographies have been translated into English including the one we talk about here, Gaston Gallimard, A Half Century of French Publishing (Harcourt Brace, 1988).

After graduating from university in 2005 Maylis Besserie began teaching documentary production at the Institute of Communications and Media in Paris, and joined France Culture as a radio producer and host. In February 2020 she published her first novel, Le Tiers Temps (Gallimard). It evokes the last days of Samuel Beckett in a Parisian retirement home. The protagonist, while describing his responses to daily life in the home, also experiences a dream-like reality as he tries to recall the people and places that marked his life. On May 11, 2020 it won the Goncourt Prize for first novel. We met at what we thought would be a quiet cafe in Paris to talk about the journey Maylis has been on with her new novel. This is the second time I've interviewed her. First time round, several years ago, we met to discuss the art of the author interview.

'Barnet Lee "Barney" Rosset, Jr. (1922 – 2012) was owner of the Grove Press publishing house and publisher and editor-in-chief at the Evergreen Review. He led a successful legal battle to publish the uncensored version of D. H. Lawrence's novel Lady Chatterley's Lover, and later was the American publisher of Henry Miller's controversial novel Tropic of Cancer. The right to publish and distribute Miller's novel in the United States was affirmed by the Supreme Court of the United States in 1964, in a landmark ruling for free speech and the First Amendment.' Under Rosset Grove introduced American readers to European avant-garde literature and theatre, publishing, among others, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Jean Genet, and Eugène Ionesco. Most importantly, in 1954, Grove started publishing Samuel Beckett John Oakes is the co-founder and 50% owner of OR Books, and publisher of the Evergreen Review, an online revival of the venerable counter-cultural literary magazine originally published by Grove Press under Barney Rosset whose memoir Rosset: My Life in Publishing and How I Fought Censorship OR Books published in 2017. I talked with John about Rosset via Zoom.

Jacques Shore is a partner in Gowling WLG's Ottawa office, a member of the firm's Advocacy Group, and past leader of the firm's Government Affairs Group.​ He has acted as lead negotiator on many business and government-related initiatives and has worked actively on behalf of the federal government of Canada and provincial governments on a broad range of legal and public policy matters​, including cultural policy. Actively involved in the community, Jacques is a past chair of Carleton University's board of governors and its executive committee and served as a board governor for thirteen years​. In addition he served as chair of the Distinguished Council of Advisors of the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs. Jacques ​is ​currently​ ​the Chair of the Library Archives Canada (LAC) Foundation (April 2019 to present).​ ​He is ​also ​counsel to Amazon, providing legal, government relations, and strategic advice to the compan​y, something I stupidly failed to ask him about. I​ did however hit him with quite a few questions about ​the ​need, ​purpose,​ mission, and plans of the new Library and Archives Canada Foundation and the people involved.

Richard Nash is a coach, strategist, and serial entrepreneur. He led partnerships and content at the culture discovery start-up Small Demons and the new media app Byliner. Previously he ran independent publishers Soft Skull (not Skill) Press and Red Lemonade where he published Maggie Nelson, Lynne Tillman, Vanessa Veselka's Zazen, Alain Mabanckou, and many others, for which work he was awarded the Association of American Publishers' Award for Creativity in Independent Publishing in 2005. In 2010 the Utne Reader named him one of 50 Visionaries Changing Your World and in 2013 the Frankfurt Book Fair picked him as one of the Five Most Inspiring People in Digital Publishing. In 2017 he founded Cursor Marketing Services, a shared US publishing office for the world's leading English-language independent publishers. As a coach, building on decades of mentorship and consulting, he now works directly with artists, writers, and entrepreneurs, helping them navigate personal and professional transitions. We met via Zoom to talk about his influential article 'What is the Business of Literature?' (My cat Boo Bou insisted on voicing her concerns during the first several minutes of the conversation. Apologies for the distraction).