The Biblio File hosted by Nigel Beale

David Frum is a senior editor at The Atlantic. From 2014 through 2017, he served as chairman of the board of trustees of the leading UK center-right think tank, Policy Exchange. In 2001-2002, he served as speechwriter and special assistant to President George W. Bush; in 2007-2008, as senior adviser to the Rudy Giuliani presidential campaigns. Frum is the author of ten books, most recently Trumpocalypse: Restoring American Democracy (the putative topic of our conversation). The memoir of his service in the George W. Bush administration, The Right Man, was a New York Times bestseller, as was his 2018 book, Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic. He and his wife Danielle Crittenden Frum live in Washington DC and Wellington, Ontario, where we met lake-side, at The Drake Devonshire, buffeted by the breeze, serenaded by the surf. We talk, among other things, about Trumpocalypse (HarperCollins, 2020); Shakespeare and Byron; crocodiles and alligators; Trump, of course; marriage; how Twitter affects the writing of a book; adolescence and childhood; Chomsky and George Washington; America the Good versus America the Bad; American exceptionalism; finding the right person; and the choice between changing the world and changing yourself.

Peter Florence is a British festival director,​​ notable for founding the Hay Festival with his​ parents, Norman​ and Rhoda Florence​. FYI t​he first festival ​was financed with winnings from a poker game. Peter​ ​was educated at Ipswich School, Jesus College, Cambridge, and the University of Paris and has an MA in Modern and Medieval Literatures. He holds honorary doctorates from ​four universities​. ​He has replicated the success of Hay in numerous cities around the world, launching similar festivals in Mantua, Segovia, the Alhambra Palace, Cartagena, Nairobi, Zacatecas, Thiruvananthapuram, Dhaka, Xalapa, Belfast and Paraty. He is the co-editor of the Oxtales and Oxtravels anthologies with Mark Ellingham of Profile Books, in partnership with Oxfam​ ​and has written for ​the​ Index on Censorship​, The Guardian​, The Telegraph​, The Spectator​ and numerous other publications.​ ​"​Florence chaired the jury of the 2019 Man Booker Prize for Fiction, and controversially defied the foundation's 1993-established rules to award the prize to two authors. Bernardine Evaristo - the first black woman to be awarded the prize - shared the prize with Margaret Atwood​." ( unfortunately, I failed to ask him about this). ​ ​He and his wife Becky Shaw have four sons. They live in Herefordshire. Peter was awarded an MBE in 2005 for services to Arts and Culture​ and​ a CBE in 2018 for services to Literature and Charity​. We met via Zoom to talk, among other things, about Hay's recent on-line, Covid-driven 2020 event and how Peter plans to capitalize on its enormous success, about what special ingredients are required to put on good festivals and interesting sessions, about the English language, party animals, translation, what makes Peter happy, and the titles of his favourite recent reads.

Mark Bourrie is a Canadian lawyer, blogger, journalist, author, historian, and lecturer. His work has appeared in many Canadian magazines and newspapers. In 2020, his book Bushrunner: The Adventures of Pierre Radisson, won the final RBC Taylor Prize for literary non-fiction. Known widely as the namesake of ships and hotel chains, Pierre-Esprit Radisson is perhaps best described, writes Mark, as "an eager hustler with no known scruples." "Kidnapped by Mohawk warriors at the age of fifteen, Radisson assimilated and was adopted by a powerful family, only to escape to New York City after less than a year. After being recaptured, he defected from a raiding party to the Dutch and crossed the Atlantic to Holland—thus beginning a lifetime of seized opportunities and frustrated ambitions. His venture as an Arctic fur trader led to the founding of the Hudson's Bay Company, which operates today, 350 years later, as North America's oldest corporation". I talked with Mark over the phone about the genesis of his book, and about Radisson and his life with capitalism, the Mohawk, the British and the French.

Ian Wilson was chief Librarian and Archivist of Canada from 2004 to 2009. Prior to this as National Archivist, with Roch Carrier the then National Librarian, he developed and led the process to merge the National Archives and National Library into a unified institution. "His distinguished career has included archival and information management, university teaching and government service." In addition, he has published extensively on history, archives, heritage, and information management and has lectured both in Canada and abroad. "Born in Montreal, Quebec, he attended the Collège militaire royal de Saint-Jean and obtained a master's degree from Queen's University in 1974. He began his career at Queen's University Archives, later becoming Saskatchewan's Provincial Archivist and Chairman of the Saskatchewan Heritage Advisory Board. He was appointed Archivist of Ontario in 1986, a position he held until 1999." ​ He chaired the Consultative Group on Canadian Archives on behalf of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. The Group's report, Canadian Archives - generally known as the "Wilson Report" - published in 1980 - has been described as "a milestone in the history of archival development in Canada."​ He is currently a consultant. ​ I met with Ian at his home in Ottawa to talk about how the merger between Library and Archives is going, about Canada's great Dominion Archivist Arthur Doughty and Canada and its Provinces his monumental, under-appreciated nation-building publishing project, and about the essential role Library and Archives Canada plays, or doesn't play, in cultivating a distinctive national Canadian identity.

Larry Grobel is the author of more than 25 books - including Conversations with Capote (which received a PEN Special Achievement award), and Talking with Michener. He has been a freelance writer for more than 40 years, having written for the New York Times, Rolling Stone, Entertainment Weekly and Movieline and many other publications. He is also a renowned interviewer, having conducted and written numerous iconic Playboy magazine interviews over the years. The magazine called him "the interviewer's interviewer" after his interview with Marlon Brando for its 25th anniversary issue. We met via Zoom to talk about his superb book The Art of the Interview (2004) and its companion volume Endangered Species: Writers Talk about their Craft, their Visions, their Lives. Its foreword calls Larry "prepared, adaptable, and graced with the intelligence needed to shoot the breeze and elicit intriguing responses, gossip and wisdom. Joyce Carol Oates has called him "the Mozart of interviewers" and J.P. Donleavy has called him "the most intelligent interviewer in the United States." He currently teaches seminars on The Art of the Interview at UCLA.

Jonathan Rose is the William R. Kenan Professor of History at Drew University. His fields of study are British history, intellectual history and the history of the book. He was the founding president of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing, and has served as the president of the Northeast Victorian Studies Association. His book, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, won the Jacques Barzun Prize , the Longman History Book of the Year Prize and the British Council Prize. Other books include The Literary Churchill, A Companion to the History of the Book, and British Literary Publishing Houses 1820-1965. His most recent work is as co-editor with Mary Hammond, of the four volume Edinburgh History of Reading. Jonathan is co-editor of Book History, which won the Council of Editors of Learned Journals award for the Best New Journal of 1999. We met via Zoom to talk about his book Reader's Liberation, a fascinating narrative history of independent skeptical reading, from antiquity to present. Topics covered include defending the humanities, free expression and leaky censorship, the importance of reader reception, reading and revolution, making the Bible accessible in everyday English, the First Amendment, Great Books programs and common conversation, the disaster of 'Common Core,' Louise Rosenblatt, Clifton Fadiman and The Book of the Month Club. the positive influence of Oprah Winfrey, the drive toward literacy in Black America, Hugh Hefner and the Playboy interviews, objective versus partisan media, "native" advertising and credibility, docile students and cancel culture.

Reni Eddo-Lodge, is a London based, award winning author and journalist. Her writing focuses on feminism and exposing structural racism. She's the author of the Jhalak Prize winning, bestselling Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race, published by Bloomsbury, and host of a podcast series called About Race. Why I'm no Longer Talking topped a public poll of twenty books shortlisted in 2018 by the UK Booksellers Association as the most influential book written by a woman We met at the Blue Met Literary Festival in Montreal (she was here to accept the Words to Change Prize, awarded to "the writer of a literary work that upholds the values of intercultural understanding and social inclusion", to talk about her book, about white people talking about racism, and about the prevalence and effects of systematic, structural racism in England and around the world.

Leslie Weir was the University Librarian at the University of Ottawa from 2003 to 2018. She became Librarian and Archivist of Canada in August, 2019. Ms. Weir is the first woman to hold this position since the National Library of Canada and the National Archives of Canada were merged to form Library and Archives Canada in 2004. She was born and raised in Montreal, earned a Bachelor of Arts in Canadian History from Concordia University in 1976 and a Masters in Library Science from McGill University in 1979. She joined the University of Ottawa in 1992. During her tenure as University Librarian, she founded the School of Information Studies in the Faculty of Arts where she was also a Professor. She was a member of the Board of the Canadian Research Knowledge Network (CRKN), from its inception until 2009 and again from 2011 to 2015. She served as President of Canadiana.org between 2012 and 2016 where she oversaw the introduction of the Heritage Project to digitize and make openly accessible some 60 million heritage archival images. Ms. Weir was also president of the Canadian Association of Research Libraries from 2007 to 2009 and president of the Ontario Library Association in 2017. We met in her high-ceilinged offices at 395 Wellington Street in Ottawa to talk about, among other things, the merging of Library and Archives, the mandate of LAC, federal government departmental libraries, the Library of Parliament, budgets, acquisitions, fundraising and the new LAC Foundation, author archives, Michael Ondaatje, exhibitions, the new LAC building, partnerships, Access to Information requests, the white diamond building, legal deposit, the Internet, Dominion Archivist Arthur Doughty, gold claims, book collecting culture, Pierre Berton, Kay Lamb, and Winston Churchill.

Of course Dublin is where the biggest Bloomsday Festival takes place each on June 16th, with celebrations set in many of the "original sites" sited in James Joyce's novel Ulysses. But did you know that the second biggest celebration in the world takes place every year in Montreal? It's grown quickly over the past four or five years, and is now a five-day affair. Dave Schurman is the president of the Festival Bloomsday Montreal. Along with his wife Judith and a team of enthusiastic volunteers, they've created "a celebration of the words and wit of Joyce, and other Irish literary lions," that features not only writers, but also musicians and actors and academics. It's quite an event. I talk with Dave about his experience establishing Bloomsday in Montreal, and pick his brain for advice about setting up similar events around the world.

Paul Litt is a historian of public life in late twentieth-century Canada. His research explores the cultural workings of modern Canadian mass democracy focusing on the media, the politics of image, tourism, the politicization of identities, and nationalism. He is currently a Professor at Carleton University in Ottawa. We met in his office to talk about 20th century Canadian government book publishing policy, specifically about Canadian cultural identity and nationalism, literature, copyright, new versus old media, documentary film, broadcasting, the Massey Commission, high versus mass culture, university funding, text books, the National Library, the Canada Council, Ryerson Press, national unity, and cultural industry policy.

Michael Dirda is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Washington Post Book World and the author of the memoir "An Open Book" and of four collections of essays: "Readings," "Bound to Please," "Book by Book" and "Classics for Pleasure." Dirda was born in Lorain, Ohio, graduated with highest honors in English from Oberlin College, and received a Ph.D. in comparative literature (medieval studies and European romanticism) from Cornell University. We met in Washington D.C., pre-Covid, to discuss specifically Michael's book Readings, and more generally the books he thinks are worth reading and collecting.

Miami native Mitchell Kaplan is the owner/founder of Books & Books, one of the premier independent bookstore groups in the United States, and a respected leader in the book business. Along with Eduardo J. Padrón, president of Miami-Dade College (MDC), he co-founded The Miami Book Fair (MBF), the largest event of its kind in the United States, in 1984. He hosts the Literary Life with Mitchell Kaplan podcast and is a partner in the book-to-film optioning business The Mazur/Kaplan Company (greatest claim to fame? The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society). I met with Mitch in the open-air restaurant at his flagship Mediterranean-styled bookstore in Coral Gables to discuss his career and success in book-selling and sundry other related enterprises. Among other things we talk about Miami, Colorado, The Beats, Red Rocks, the Tulagi Bar in Boulder, 18th century London bookseller James Lackington, 'third places,' community, bookstore restaurants, remainders, the Books & Books Press, and movies.

This is one of the very earliest Biblio File interviews. Please excuse the audio. (Listening to it - I'm embarrassed to learn that I wasn't able to read all of Certainty before conducting the interview - despite not having had much time to prepare [This would never happen today - well, except in the case of Eimear McBride's A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing, but that's another story] ). Madeleine Thien was born in Vancouver. She is the author of the story collection Simple Recipes (2001), and three novels, Certainty (2006); Dogs at the Perimeter (2011), shortlisted for Berlin's International Literature Prize and winner of the Frankfurt Book Fair's 2015 Liberaturpreis; and Do Not Say We Have Nothing (2016), about musicians studying Western classical music at the Shanghai Conservatory in the 1960s, and about the legacy of the 1989 Tiananmen demonstrations. Her books and stories are published in Canada, the U.S., the U.K. and Australia, and have been translated into 25 languages. Do Not Say We Have Nothing won the 2016 Scotiabank Giller Prize, the 2016 Governor-General's Literary Award for Fiction, and an Edward Stanford Prize; and was shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize, the 2017 Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction, and The Folio Prize 2017. The novel was named a New York Times Critics' Top Book of 2016 and longlisted for a Carnegie Medal.

Sydney Smith was born in rural Nova Scotia and started drawing at an early age. Since graduating from NSCAD University, he has illustrated numerous children's books, including the highly acclaimed wordless picture book Sidewalk Flowers, conceived by Jon Arno Lawson. It won a Governor General's Award, among many other honours, and was named a New York Times Best Illustrated Children's Book. Sydney is also the illustrator of Town Is by the Sea by Joanne Schwartz, for which he was awarded the Kate Greenaway Medal, and which won the TD Canadian Children's Literature Prize. Small in the City is the first picture book that Sydney has both written and illustrated. It is the winner of The Ezra Jack Keats Award for Writer! A New York Times/New York Public Library Best Illustrated Book of the Year An ALA Notable Children's Book A Capitol Choices Noteworthy Title and Canada's Governor General's Literary Award. I met Sydney in Ottawa after he'd received his award. We talk about a short poem by G.K. Chesterton; Randolf Caldecott, passing shadows, counterpoint, Maurice Sendak, the relationship between illustrator and author; Alligator Pie, Dennis Lee and Frank Newfeld; safe places to process complex emotions; Neal Porter; and sharing excitement.

Blake Gopnik is an American/Canadian art critic who has lived in New York City since 2011 writing about art for Newsweek, the Daily Beast, The New York Times and others. From 2000 to 2010 he was chief art critic at The Washington Post, prior to which he was arts editor and critic for the Globe and Mail in Toronto. He has a doctorate in art history from Oxford University, and has written on aesthetic topics ranging from design to food, fashion to beer. He is the author of Warhol, a big new biography of the American Pop artist Andy Warhol ( Ecco, 2020), which is what we talk about, computer to computer, here. Topics covered include the practice of biography, Robert Caro, police violence and homosexuals, Warhol: genius and/or jerk? Window dressing, the Factory, shoes, silk-screening, commercial versus fine art, Pop Art, Robert Hughes and stupidity, film, the Empire State Building, banality, Tolstoy, sweeping polemics, controversy, playing dumb and much more.

Don Gillmor is an award-winning Canadian novelist, journalist and children's book author. His new book To the River (2018) explores his brother's suicide. It won the 2019 Governor General's Literary Award for non-fiction and was a CBC Best Books of 2019. His novel Long Change (2015) examines the world of oil through the life and loves of one man. Mount Pleasant (2013) is a darkly comic meditation on privilege and debt set in contemporary Toronto, and his first novel, the critically acclaimed Kanata (2009), dealt with the whole sweep of Canadian history. He is also the author of a two-volume history of Canada, Canada: A People's History, and three other books of non-fiction. He has written nine books for children, and won 11 National Magazine Awards plus numerous other honours. He lives in Toronto. We met in Ottawa to discuss To the River, and to share thoughts on what it's like to lose a brother to suicide.

"Helene Atwan is the Director of Beacon Press, an independent non-profit book publisher founded in 1854. She began her publishing career in 1976 at Random House in New York as an assistant editor in their College Division, before moving to Alfred A. Knopf in 1977 as a publicity associate. She then joined The Viking Press in 1979 as the associate director of publicity. In 1981, she moved to Farrar, Straus and Giroux, where she began as the director of publicity. She also became a vice president of the house in 1987 and the associate publisher in 1991. In 1993, she joined the Pocket Books division of Simon & Schuster as a vice president and director of marketing. She was appointed director of Beacon Press by the board of trustees of the Unitarian Universalists Association in October of 1995." We met at her offices in Boston to talk about Emerson and the history of the Beacon Press, plus its connection to the Unitarian Universalists; Helene's role with the press; social justice - slavery, reparations, inter-sectional issues, and the environment; about the price of paper, the function of design, and the process of editing books at Beacon; plus Victor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning, and newly discovered Yes to Life, and much more.

David Gilmour is a Canadian novelist and former television journalist and film critic. Born in London, Ontario, Gilmour later moved to Toronto for schooling. He is a graduate of Upper Canada College and the University of Toronto. In 1980 he became managing editor of the Toronto International Film Festival, a post he held for four years. In 1986 he joined CBC Television as a film critic for The Journal, eventually becoming host of the program's Friday night arts and entertainment show. In 1990, he began hosting Gilmour on the Arts, an arts show series on CBC Newsworld. In 1997 he left the CBC to concentrate full time on his writing. His 2005 novel A Perfect Night to Go to China won the 2005 Governor General's Award for English fiction. In 2007 he won two gold National Magazine Awards for his essay "My Life with Tolstoy" which appeared in The Walrus magazine. Today Gilmour is a Professor of Literary Studies at Victoria College at the U of T where he has taught Creative Writing and Literature since 2006. D​avid recently mentioned to me that he was a fan of Truman Capote. I suggested we get together to discuss one of his short stories. We settled on 'Mojave'. Here's our conversation. Warning: it gets a tad raunchy at times.

Paul Wright was Editor of the UMass Press from 1988 to 2006. He was Executive Editor of the Book Series, "Studies in Print Culture and the History of the Book," from 1994–2006. From 1985 to 1988 he was Assistant to the Chancellor of the University of Massachusetts Boston. Prior to that he served as a Free-Lance Editor and Writer, from 1981–1985. Before that he worked as Acquisitions Editor for several Boston-based academic publishers. We met at his home in South Boston to discuss how he built UMass's line of Book History books, along with his own scholarly work in the field.

Stephanie Burt is a literary critic and poet who is Professor of English at Harvard University and a transgender activist. The New York Times has called her "one of the most influential poetry critics of [her] generation". Burt grew up near Washington, D.C. She has published four collections of poetry and many works of literary criticism. Her articles have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The London Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, The Believer, and The Boston Review. Her book Randall Jarrell and His Age reevaluates Jarrell's importance as a poet. The book won the Warren Brooks Award in 2002. In 2017, she transitioned to female. She has since been active in LGBTQA+ rights and awareness campaigns We met at her offices in Cambridge, MA to talk about this, and about her recent book Don't Read Poetry. Among other things we discuss how to read poetry, or avoid it; the acceptance of music versus poetry; Seamus Heaney and James Joyce; Rupi Kaur and teenage girls, Lorine Niedecker, Robin Robertson, Terrance Hayes's 'American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin'. Reasons to read poetry: - giving voice to a state of mind, character - living the lives of others - verbal technique, challenge, wisdom - helping you to decide what to do - and underestimating the time it takes to walk places.

Simon Beattie is a British antiquarian bookseller, literary translator and composer. He was the first British bookseller to be featured in Fine Books & Collections Magazine's series Bright Young Things. Beattie was educated at Aylesbury Grammar School and the University of Exeter, where he took a double first in German and Russian (1997) and subsequently studied for an MA in Lexicography (1998), which he passed with Distinction. Whilst at Exeter, Beattie also held a choral scholarship at Exeter Cathedral. After a brief period freelancing in the publishing business Beattie joined the London antiquarian booksellers Bernard Quaritch Ltd in 1998. In January 2010 he set up his own company specialising in European cross-cultural history. His printed catalogues, entitled Short Lists, have won numerous awards. He was a 2012 winner in the Smarta 100 Awards for 'the most resourceful, original, exciting and disruptive small businesses in the UK' and has taught at the York Antiquarian Book Seminar since its inception in 2014. It was Beattie who set in motion the worldwide strike by over 450 booksellers against AbeBooks' decision to withdraw from the Czech Republic, Hungary, Russia, and South Korea in November 2018. Beattie's translation of Gottfried Benn's shocking first poem 'Morgue' was published in 2018. His translation of the novel At the Edge of the Night by the German writer Friedo Lampe was published by Hesperus Press in 2019. Finally, Beattie also composes choral music. His setting of Advent Calendar, a poem by Rowan Williams, was broadcast on BBC Radio 3 as part of the 2008 Advent carol service from St John's College, Cambridge. I met Simon in Boston, prior to last year's Antiquarian Book Fair, to talk books, more specifically endpapers and Simon's phenomenally successful 'We love Endpapers' Facebook group. We also talk about speaking foreign languages, cultures being curious about one another, exploration, the reception of Oscar Wilde in Russia, translation and censorship, pleasant surprises, marbled paper, brocade paper, bookseller catalogues, and enjoying what you do.

The Osborne Collection of Early Children's Books contains more than 80,000 items. The nucleus of the collection, which has a cut-off date of 1910, was donated to the Toronto Public Library in 1946 by a British librarian from Derbyshire, Edgar Osborne. Unable to get any English libraries to meet his conditions - to properly house his books, describe them and publish a catalogue - he settled on Toronto, largely because he was so impressed by its Children's librarian Lillian H. Smith who he'd met during a visit to the library with his wife in 1934. I met with Librarian Jennifer Yan in late 2019. Listen as she explains why we literary tourists need to visit the Osborne Collection in Toronto.

Robert Darnton is Harvard University's Carl H. Pforzheimer Professor, Emeritus and University Librarian, Emeritus He was educated at Harvard and Oxford (where he was a Rhodes scholar). After a brief stint as a reporter for The New York Times, he became a junior fellow in the Society of Fellows at Harvard. He taught at Princeton from 1968 until 2007 when he came to fill the roles mentioned above. Among his honors are a MacArthur Prize Fellowship, a National Book Critics Circle Award, election to the French Legion of Honor, the National Humanities Medal, and the Del Duca World Prize in the Humanities. He has written and edited many books, including The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclopédie (1979, an early attempt to develop the history of books as a field of study), The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (1984, his most popular work) and The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Prerevolutionary France (1995, a study of the underground book trade). We met at his office in the Widener Library to talk, among other things, about why book history in so exciting; French police enforcing edicts on the book trade; The Private Life of Louis XV, sex, scandal and politics; David Hall; the fertile crescent of publishing houses around France in the 18th century; book pirating; the communications circuit; and Roger Chartier, and the fluidity of texts.

Jessie Amaolo is a librarian at the Toronto Public Library responsible for their world-class Arthur Conan Doyle collection. Not surprisingly, much of the collection is devoted to Doyle's most famous character, Sherlock Holmes. But Conan Doyle wrote much more than just the Sherlock Holmes stories. He also wrote extensively on spiritualism, true crime, history, and current events. The collection is accessed through the Marilyn & Charles Baillie Special Collections Centre on the 5th floor of the Library, near Bloor and Yonge streets in Toronto, which is where we met to discuss why the literary tourist should visit here.

George Andreou was appointed director of the Harvard University Press (HUP) in September, 2017 replacing William P. Sisler who had been in the position for some 27 years. Born in New York, Andreou spent much of his early childhood in Greece. He graduated from Harvard College in 1987 with a degree in English literature and languages. Prior to coming to Harvard he was senior editor and vice president at Alfred A. Knopf where he founded Vintage Español, an imprint created to publish books in Spanish for the U.S. market. Over the years he edited the works of many impressive writers, including John Ashbery, Junot Díaz, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Sonia Sotomayor, and the Nobel laureates V.S. Naipaul and Orhan Pamuk. I sat down with George recently at his HUP offices in Cambridge, MA, to discuss, among other things, the practice of reading; the role of the editor; the temporality of writing, "what to say, what not to say, and when;" reading books at the right time; editors becoming publishers, the differences between university and trade publishing; peer review; book design; and Thomas Piketty's new book Capital and Ideology.

David Emblidge spent his childhood in Buffalo, New York and "on the sunny beaches of Ontario's Lake Erie." After university he worked at the Associated Press as a reporter covering everything from the "disappearance of rural doctors to hog futures, and one murder." Before entering the publishing trade as a second career he spent ten rewarding years as a professor following on degrees in English (Univ. of Virginia) and American Studies (Univ. of Minnesota). He worked in publishing for nearly twenty-five years – as acquisitions editor, book packager, publishing consultant, editor in chief, and publisher. The houses: Harvard University Press, Cambridge University Press, Continuum, The Mountaineers Books. He founded Berkshire House Publishers (travel, regional literature and history, food), and eventually sold it to WW Norton. As a book packager, he produced multi-volume series on various subjects for major trade book publishers such as St. Martins, Watson-Guptil, and Stackpole. He currently holds a tenured position at Emerson College, in Boston in the Dept. of Writing, Literature and Publishing. We met at his offices there to discuss the histories of four iconic American bookstores: Boston's Old Corner Bookstore, Manhattan's Scribner's Bookstore and Gotham Book Mart, and San Francisco's City Lights. Along the way we meet Ticknor & Fields, Emerson, Thoreau and Hawthorne; Frances Steloff and T.S. Eliot; and on the West Coast, Lawrence Monsanto Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg. Join us for the ride.

Greg Gibson is the author of four books, including Gone Boy: A Walkabout about the murder of his eighteen-year-old son Galen. After receiving his BA from Swathmore College in 1967, Greg enlisted in the United States navy and worked as a shipfitter until 1971. After his discharge in 1971 he moved to Gloucester, Mass. and worked in a variety of manual jobs until 1976 when he opened Ten Pound Book Company and began his career as an antiquarian book dealer, specializing in nautical books. This is what we met to discuss at The Boston Antiquarian Book Fair. We tackle Moby Dick, yachting, the growing popularity of ephemera and one of a kind materials, ship logs, letters, sailor's journals & letters, Joshua Slocum, prostitutes, venereal disease, scurvy and much more.

"Heather O'Donnell grew up in the library stacks and bookstore aisles of suburban Delaware. In 1989, she moved to New York City, where she studied English at Columbia, and held down a series of bookish jobs on the side: working the cash register at the Strand, shelving photobooks in the Avery Library, sifting the slush pile at Grand Street. While writing her doctoral dissertation in the Yale English department, Heather worked as a curatorial assistant at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. In 2004 she left academia to pursue the rare book trade full-time. For seven years, she worked as a bookseller in the New York gallery of Bauman Rare Books. In the fall of 2011, she founded Honey & Wax Booksellers in Brooklyn. In 2017, she and Rebecca Romney established the annual Honey & Wax Book Collecting Prize of $1000 for a young woman book collector." We met at her office early one crisp October morning to talk about all of the above, plus Gertrude Stein, Henry James, completionists, bona fide collectors, publishers' bindings and women reading, the need for unusual distinctive inventory, the way core texts reach wider audiences, apprenticing, James Jaffe, and the valuable contribution collectors make to society.

Matthew Budman lives in Manhattan with his wife, political theorist Cristina Beltrán, and all the books they can squeeze into their apartment. Budman is the author of Instant Expert: Collecting Books (House of Collectibles), which sold nearly 10,000 copies, and Book Collecting Now: The Value of Print in a Digital Age, published in 2019. It's an engaging guide to building a book collection and celebrates the young, diverse collectors revitalizing what he calls "the world's greatest pastime." Among other things, the book examines fundamentals like: identifying first editions, how to get the best deals, understanding the value of autographs, care and repair of books, and the history of publishing and book collecting. We touch on much of this, and New York and white slavery and more, in our conversation, which took place in Matthew's book-lined apartment in Greenwich Village. The bathroom even has a decent selection to choose from!

Founded in 1884, the Grolier Club is America's oldest and largest society for bibliophiles and enthusiasts in the graphic arts. Named after Jean Grolier (1489/90-1565), the collector renowned for sharing his library with friends, the Club's objective is to promote "the study, collecting, and appreciation of books and works on paper." Through the efforts more than eight hundred members the Club pursues this mission through its library, its public exhibitions and lectures, and its long and distinguished series of publications. I met with Bruce Crawford, the club's current president (and a collector of Charles Dickens and other 19th-century authors) in the Thomas Phillips room of the Club's headquarters in New York, along with Susan Flamm, who is in charge of P.R. We talk about the Club's history and mission, book collecting, Charles Darwin, minnows, and much more.

Jerry Kelly is a calligrapher, book and type designer. His work has been honored many times - his designs have been selected more than thirty times for the AIGA "Fifty Books of the Year." In 2015 he was presented with the Goudy Award from The Rochester Institute of Technology. Kelly has served as Chairman of the American Printing History Association, and President of The Typophiles. He is an active member of several committees at The Grolier Club. He has written many articles and 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). Kelly has taught typography at Pratt Institute and Parsons School of Design, and has lectured on the subject for The Cooper Union and numerous other organizations. Before starting his own design business in 1998, Kelly was Vice President of The Stinehour Press, preceded by a decade as designer at A. Colish. We met at The Grolier Club in New York to discuss some of the great type and book designers Jerry writes about in A Century for a Century. The two other books of special interest to collectors mentioned during our conversation are The Best of Both Worlds: Finely Printed Livres d Artistes, 1910 2010, and The Art of the Book in the Twentieth Century

McNally Jackson Books is an independent bookstore based in New York City owned and operated by Sarah McNally, a former editor at Basic Books and the daughter of Holly and Paul McNally, founders of McNally Robinson Booksellers based in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Sarah opened her first of seven stores in 2004 as a branch of McNally Robinson. In August 2008 she established McNally Jackson as an independent company. In October 2019 she met me. We consorted in the basement of her flagship store. Two thirds of the way through our conversation we were jointed by Jeff Deutsch, Director of Chicago's Seminary Co-op Bookstore. Among other things, our discussion covers chocolate bars, delegation, Sunday emails, rents & real estate, the procreation of bookstores, Sarah's stationery, aversion to irrational travel rules, reading not changing the world, smugness, Trevor Noah's book, mutual respect, civic missions, retail in Paris, mobs of tourists, visuals, the importance of cover designs, the retreat of criticism, Instagram, bugs, Bison Books, offices, seminary students, lines on the floor, browsing, tables and buying-energy, matcha and mouldy mugs.

Chip Kidd is an American graphic designer best known for his book covers. Based in New York City, Kidd is arguably the most famous dust jacket designers in the world. He has been credited by many as having spawned "a revolution in the art of America book packaging," despite having no recognizable style. In fact, he says that "A signature look is crippling… [because] the simplest and most effective solutions aren't dictated by style." It has been said by many that the history of book design can be split into two eras: before Kidd and after. He went to work at Knopf in 1986. Today he is associate art director and freelances widely, designing in total, some 75 dust jackets a year. We met in his offices at Knopf in New York to discuss his book Chip Kidd: Book 2. In so doing we talk about Meryl Streep, Haruki Murakami Martin Amis, the Eisner Awards, French kissing Neil Gaiman and connecting with authors, Alfred and Blanche Knopf, Sonny Mehta, D.A. Dwiggins, Paul Bacon, Geek Love, die cuts, Glamorama, the Yale Review, Chip's late husband poet and Yale Review editor J. D. McClatchy, Chris Ware, the Factory record label, Peter Seville, New Order album covers, the importance of dust jackets and identities, ebooks, death, being paid for your ideas and much more. * This interview was recorded in October, 2019. Sonny Mehta died in December, 2019.

Bay Area letterpress printer, designer, and publisher Peter Rutledge Koch is recognized as one of the most accomplished printers and typographic designers of his generation. Here he is in his own words: "For the past thirty-two years I have cultivated a cross-media dialogue between art, philosophy and literature. I have conducted my business as a fine-art printer as a means of creating and transmitting my own ideas about language and form, both by creating my own work and by designing and directing collaborative publishing projects with others. In pursuit of my art, I am deeply committed to the crafts of typography, papermaking, printing, bookbinding and the design of books and I support these crafts as intensely as I can. A duality of commitment defines my art. I firmly stand on the side of the argument that there is no art without craft. Art without craft denies the difficult beauty of a thing well made, the elegant simplicity of an idea. Through craft and the precision of design, I seek to bring the rich civilization of the printed book with me to the forge of meaning." We met in New York just prior to him presenting a talk on his craft to The Grolier Club, which, at the time was hosting a 45 year retrospective of his work.

Classical Pursuits is a cultural and educational travel company based in Toronto, Canada, specializing in small group literary travel and learning vacations. It provides adventures for the mind and travel for the soul - to places like Hemingway's Paris, Joyce's Dublin, Dante Alighieri's Italy, and Flannery O'Connor's Savannah and the Andalusia family farm in Georgia. It offers both scheduled small group tours and private educational group travel planning for existing groups. Ann Kirkland is the president and founder of the company. I caught up with her at Toronto Pursuits, an annual gathering where over 100 people from across Canada and the U.S. get together on the garden campus of the University of Toronto's Victoria College to discuss great books.

Steven Heller wears many hats and has written and/or published many books (190+ to date). For 33 years he was an art director at the New York Times, originally on the OpEd Page and for almost 30 of those years with the New York Times Book Review. Currently, he is co-chair of the MFA Designer as Author Department, Special Consultant to the President of SVA for New Programs, and writes the Visuals column for the New York Times Book Review. We met at his office in New York to talk about Jackets Required: An Illustrated History of the American Book Jacket 1920-1950, a book he co-wrote with Seymour Chwast in the 1990s. We start off discussing this eloquent description "At once seductive, informative, and ephemeral, a book jacket is designed to evoke - and promote - the contents of a book"; and then move on to Art Deco, futurism, Bauhaus, de Stijl, constructivism, typography, lettering and book collecting. Designers covered include Paul Rand, Alvin Lustig, E. Mcknight-Kauffer, W.A. Dwiggins and George Salter.

Charlotte Gray is one of Canada's best-known writers, and author of ten acclaimed books of literary non-fiction. Born in Sheffield, England, and educated at Oxford University and the London School of Economics, she began her writing career in England as a magazine editor and newspaper columnist. After coming to Canada in 1979, she worked as a political commentator, book reviewer and magazine columnist before she turned to biography and popular history. She's been a judge for several of Canada's most prestigious literary awards, including the Giller and Cundall Prizes; has five honorary doctorates and how won numerous awards, including the Pierre Berton Award for distinguished achievement in popularizing Canadian history. We met at her home near the Governor General's grounds in Ottawa to riff off renowned LBJ biographer Robert Caro's latest book, Working. We talk about, among other things, Caro's practice, Pierre Berton, Charlotte's latest book Murdered Midas; A Millionaire, His Goldmine and a Strange Death on an Island Paradise, a biography of the Canadian mine owner Sir Harry Oakes, research methods, academics, adding voices to the mix, academics, the teaching of history, the removal of Sir John A. MacDonald's statue, local historians, and the current dearth of Canadian historical novels.

Marc Côté is the publisher of Cormorant Books, "a literary house noted for the discovery and development of Canadian writing talent and the publishing of Québécois 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. Prior to taking over at Cormorant in 2001, Marc cut a wide swath through the halls of Canada's book publishing industry, holding positions, many of them short lived, at, among other places, the Canadian Book Information Centre (marketing arm of the Association for Canadian Publishers), Books in Canada, the World's Biggest Bookstore, the Ontario Arts Council, the Literary Press Group of Canada (a sales and distribution co-op for small presses), the Canada Council, Dundurn Press, and Stoddart Publishing. We talk about all of these organizations. In so doing Marc provides a fascinating, provocative survey of Canadian book publishing, past and present.

Serge Loubier is President and CEO of Marquis Book Printing, "Canada's number one monochrome book printer," founded in 1937. As Serge puts it: "Along with my love of book printing and manufacturing and all the technology that goes into it is a passion for the end result. Literature as an art form is about contributing to culture, challenging assumptions and fueling our desire to learn. I appreciate the value of every book that we produce and take great pride in upholding the very highest standards of excellence for our customers." We met at his Montreal offices to talk about the book printing business, acquisitions and the growth of Marquis, the nature of the Quebec and Canadian markets, North American competition, the importance of good equipment and happy employees, working with publishers, and much more.

Sheila Fischman is a renowned Canadian translator who specializes in translating works of contemporary Quebec literature into English. Born in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan she was brought up in Ontario, and holds an M.A. from the University of Toronto. She is a former editor of the Montreal Star's book section, as well as a columnist for The Globe and Mail and the Montreal Gazette and a broadcaster for CBC Radio. She's also a founding member of the Literary Translators' Association of Canada and has translated more than 200 Quebec works into English, including novels by such noted authors as Michel Tremblay, Hubert Aquin, Anne Hébert, Marie-Claire Blais, Roch Carrier, Yves Beauchemin, and Kim Thúy. She has won many awards including the Governor General's Award for Translation, and the Molson Prize for the Arts. We met at her home in Montreal to talk, among other things, about Quebec, her career and role as a translator, Mordecai Richler, the Plateau in Montreal, North Hatley, house parties, booze and poets, the language question, La Guerre, Yes Sir, the church and large families, separatism, names on front covers, obsessiveness, humility, Leonard Cohen, musicality, swear words and the vessels of the alter, capturing 'voice", pure laine and much more.

A specialist in Canadian publishing history, Janet B. Friskney, is the author of New Canadian Library: The Ross-McClelland Years, 1952-1978 (published by the University of Toronto Press). Her publication credits include articles on the Methodist Book and Publishing House of Toronto, nineteenth-century Bible and tract society activity in Canada, and the history of publishing for the blind in Canada. She served as Associate Editor to Volume 3 of the History of the Book in Canada, and edited and introduced Thirty Years of Storytelling: Selected Short Fiction by Ethelwyn Wetherald. We met at Carleton University to discuss the history and evolution of McClelland & Stewart's New Canadian Library (NCL) reprint series. Topics covered include the relationship between Jack McClelland and Malcolm Ross, selection criteria, the commerce of publishing a reprint series, teaching Canadian novels in Canadian universities, the ambivalent nature of introductions used to accompany some NCL titles, book designer Frank Newfeld, Canada's literary heritage, and the current status of the NCL.

Chester Gryski holds a B. A. (Hons) in Political Science and Economics from the University of Toronto and a J. D. from Osgoode Hall Law School of York University. He was called to the Ontario bar in 1976. He has acted for MPAC and its predecessor assessing authorities since 1976. In those 40 years, he has dealt with all types of properties and all issues with a particular emphasis on industrial properties and contaminated lands. Outside of his legal practice he is an ex officio Director of the Alcuin Society of Canada and a renowned collector of Canadian fine press printing which is why he is on the Biblio File podcast. We met at his home just outside of Kingston, Ontario to talk, among other things, about how to evaluate fine press printing, Canadian book designer and typographer Glenn Goluska, Ryerson College printing and design teacher Denis Milton, the English private press tradition, the Grimsby Wayzgoose, Will Reuter, the Barbarian Press, the Heavenly Monkey Press, Jason Dewinetz, Margaret Lock, Robert Reid, Jim Rimmer, bibliographies, why we collect, and much more.

Daniel Woolf is a British/Canadian historian. He served as the 20th Principal and Vice-Chancellor of Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario from September, 2009 to June, 2019, when he returned to teaching and research. He was previously Professor, Department of History and Classics at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, where he also served as Dean of the Faculty of Arts. He studied history at Queen's and Oxford Universities, and is the author of many books, including The Oxford History of Historical Writing, (general editor), 5 vols, (Oxford University Press, 2011–12) and most recently, A Concise History of History, (Cambridge University press, 2019). Most important to our purposes, he's also a book collector, specializing in 15th-18th century histories. We met at his home near Kingston, Ontario, to talk about, among other things, the evolution of his collection, the poet Ben Johnson, wedding anniversaries, antiquarian books, tythes and local histories, book historian Jonathan Rose, 'things not kings', maps, abebooks and biblio.com, historiography and the history of history, Chronicles, Attic Books, the Schulich-Woolf Rare Book Collection, going cold turkey, and the domestic police.

John Ivison is a Scottish Canadian journalist who is Ottawa Bureau Chief for the National Post. Raised in Dumfries, Scotland, he worked as a reporter for The Scotsman newspaper in Edinburgh and as deputy business editor of Scotland on Sunday. He was educated at the University of Glasgow, McMaster University and the University of Western Ontario, where he earned a masters degree in Journalism. He moved to Canada in 1998 as part of the team that launched the National Post, and has covered provincial politics in Ontario and federal politics in Ottawa since 2003. He appears as a panelist on various Canadian TV public affairs programs and is the author of Trudeau: The Education of a Prime Minister (2019), a biography of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau that focuses on his government's promise-filled first mandate. Ivison is married to Canadian diplomat Dana Cryderman, and has three children. Together they have taught him 'how to be content.' I want to be content, so my initial questions deal with this topic. We then discuss John's moves back and forth between Scotland and Canada, shuffle on to the story of the book itself, and then on to Trudeau and the lessons he may or may not have learned during his tenure in office. I raise the topic of the Post's right wing board of directors, and throw in some of John's humour and political wisdom, and we close with an examination of truth, and whether or not Canadians can trust Justin Trudeau.

This past summer Meghan O'Rourke was appointed editor of The Yale Review. In an award citation the Whiting Foundation praised her "far-reaching and ambitious" work, and noted that her "voice stands out for its power and originality." She is the author of the memoir The Long Goodbye (2011) and the poetry collections Once (2011), Halflife (2007), and Sun In Days (2017), which The New York Times named one of the 10 Best Poetry Books of the year. Her essays and poems have appeared in magazines such as The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, and Poetry. She has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Radcliffe Fellowship, a Whiting Award, a Lannan fellowship, two Pushcart Prizes, the May Sarton Poetry Prize, the Union League Prize from the Poetry Foundation, and a Front Page Award for her cultural criticism. She has taught at New York University, Princeton, and The New School, and is currently completing a book about chronic illness. I met with Meghan in her new, bare-walled office in New Haven. It was her very first day on the job, working in the office that is. Among other things we talked about the history of The Yale Review, bridging disciplines, current events, criticism, the Paris Review in its heyday, magazines as spawning grounds for books, re-designs; private experiences with print and the pleasures of being immersed in reading; book designer Chip Kidd; Pentagram; book collecting, broadsides, and much more.

Sandra Campbell, a graduate of Carleton and Ottawa Universities, specializes in Canadian and Caribbean (Bermuda) women's writing, in particular for the period 1880-1940. She has a particular interest in women's autobiography as well as gender, and the publishing industry. Professor Campbell has taught at Carleton, the University of Ottawa and McGill University, and as a Visiting Lecturer at Bermuda College. She is the author of numerous articles and co-editor of three anthologies of short fiction by Canadian women writers. We met a her home in Kingston, Ontario to talk about Both Hands, her biography of one of Canada's greatest publishers, Lorne Pierce (1890-1961) of Ryerson Press.

Michel Gauthier has enjoyed a distinguished career in the field of festival events, tourism and recreation. He was instrumental in coordinating the participation of HRH Princess Margriet of the Netherlands in the 50th Anniversary Celebrations of the Canadian Tulip Festival, an organization that he managed from 1992 - 2005. This flagship event draws millions of visitors from all over the world each spring to Canada's capital city. From 1984-1988 he was Executive Director of Winterlude, another of Ottawa's popular festivals. Over the years he has also been active in many national and international associations. He is currently Executive Director of the Canadian Garden Council. Michel holds a Festival Director Certificate from Perdue University and a Recreation Diploma from Algonquin College. I met with him at his home, in his library, to discuss not festivals or tulips, but his other grand passion, photography books. Among other things we talk about nudes, limited editions, black and white contrast, his mother's photo albums, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Richard Avedon, Edward Steichen, Helmut Newton, The Beatles, Patti Smith and travelling the world visiting exotic bookshops, and connecting with booksellers and great photographers.

"In 1989, Scott deWolfe began selling Shaker books, ephemera, photographs and manuscripts. Frank Wood had been selling used and rare books since the 1970s. Both worked for the Sabbathday Shaker Community in Maine. When the two realized they would make good business partners, they started doing shows together in 1990. Two years later, during a snow storm on April Fool's Day, the doors to De Wolfe & Wood opened for the first time." I met with the two of them at their store in Alfred, Maine to take up the story from here.

Earlier this year the Beinecke Library hosted an exhibition entitled Bibliomania; or Book Madness: A Bibliographical Romance. It takes its name from the history of "arrant book-lovers" written by Thomas Frognall Dibdin. "It follows these lovers of the book through four case studies, observing the powerful and often unexpected relationships of books with their readers, owners, authors, collectors, and creators." "Every Book in the World! explores the passionate collecting and printing history of the legendary nineteenth-century bibliomaniac Thomas Phillipps, whose vast collection of manuscripts and early printed books filled an English country house and required more than a century of public auctions and sales to disperse." I met with curators Ray Clemens and Diane Ducharme to talk about Phillipps, his family, his temperament, his ambition, the scope of his collection, and of course, his obsessive, destructive collecting habit.

John Sawatsky is a Canadian author, journalist and interviewing consultant. Born in Winkler, Manitoba, he attended Simon Fraser University in the late 1960s graduating in political science. He started his career as an investigative reporter in the 1970s. While working as Ottawa correspondent for the Vancouver Sun he published a series of articles on misdeeds of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, for which he received the 1976 Michener Award. He left daily journalism in 1979 to write books, among them a biography of Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney published 1991. In 1982, Sawatsky began teaching classes in investigative journalism and has been an adjunct professor of journalism at Carleton University's School of Journalism since 1991. Sawatsky also works as a consultant in the practice of interviewing and has taught interviewing techniques to television anchors, reporters and print journalists in many parts of the world, including Canada, Singapore, The United States, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. He currently teaches an interview-technique seminar for sports reporters at ESPN. The seminar focuses on remedying "the sloppy and ineffective interviewing techniques often employed by many of today's major television and cable news interviewers". In 2004, he was hired full-time by ESPN as senior director of talent development. We met at his home in Connecticut where I tried to discover from him how best to interview an author. During our conversation we talk about the merits of having an opinion, the positives and negatives of disagreeing with your guests and/or letting them shine, micro and macro interviewing strategies, open and close ended questions, football play-books, Howard Stern, David Letterman, Jay Leno and Johnny Carson.