The Biblio File hosted by Nigel Beale

Laura Claridge has written books ranging from feminist theory to biography and popular culture, most recently the story of an American icon, Emily Post: Daughter of the Gilded Age, Mistress of American Manners, for which she received a National Endowment for the Humanities grant. This project also received the J. Anthony Lukas Prize for a Work in Progress, administered by the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Born in Clearwater, Florida, Laura received her Ph.D. in British Romanticism and Literary Theory from the University of Maryland in 1986. She taught in the English departments at Converse and Wofford colleges in Spartanburg, SC, and was a tenured professor of English at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis until 1997. Laura's biography of iconic publisher Blanche Knopf, The Lady with the Borzoi, was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in April, 2016. We met a her home in New York's Hudson Valley to discuss Blanche's role as publisher, and wife to Alfred Knopf.

Barabara Slate is "an artist, cartoonist, graphic novelist, comic book creator, and writer. She is one of the few female artists who has created, written, and drawn comics for both DC and Marvel Comics." In 1986 Barbara created 'Angel Love' for DC Comics, an adult-themed series for teenagers. In an exhibition review, The New York Times described her art as "emphatically of our time with its narrative of passion, gun violence, and female assertiveness." Her textbook, You Can Do a Graphic Novel, was first published in 2010 by Penguin. Barbara recently updated it, so I took the opportunity to interview her at her home in the Hudson Valley (one that she shares with her famed husband, book binder Richard Minsky). Among other things we talk about Barbara's latest work, The Mueller Report Graphic Novel, about stick figures, personal creativity, artistic style, creating compelling characters; about page layout, writer's block, and breaking into the biz, plus loads of other useful advice on how to write/draw/create a successful graphic novel. And then there's a visit from Sparky the dog.

James Daunt is the founder of the Daunt Books chain, and since May 2011 has been managing director of the bookshop chain Waterstones. In June 2019, he became the CEO of the US bookstore chain Barnes & Noble, acquired by Waterstones's parent, Elliott Advisors for $683m. We met last year in London to discuss Waterstones's impressive turn-around. We met last week in a small room (with apologies for the loud-ish air ventilation system) in the basement of the Union Square branch of Barnes & Noble in New York to talk about what's next for Barnes & Noble (The green room was occupied by Malcolm Gladwell who was delivering a talk at the store that evening).

Leslie Hurtig was born into a house of books and has had a long, successful career in Canada's book industry. She has worked for some of Canada's best bookstores, acted as a sales representative and publicist for some of North America's great publishers, and worked as a foreign rights and contracts manager at Raincoast Books. Leslie sat on the Board of Directors for the Vancouver Writers Fest before taking on her "dream job" position as Artistic Director. Jan Walter has spent her life around books: selling, editing, publishing, promoting. She began as a bookseller at Mel Hurtig's store in Edmonton, eventually running her own – Fifth Business Books. She has worked as an editor and in executive positions with several Canadian publishing companies. In 1988, with Gary Ross and John Macfarlane, she started Macfarlane, Walter & Ross, which became Canada's premier publisher of quality non-fiction, publishing titles including Boom, Bust & Echo by David Foot, The Danger Tree by David Macfarlane, and On the Take by Stevie Cameron Jan has been involved in publishing education at institutions across Canada, teaching at Simon Fraser and Ryerson Universities. She moved to Kingston, Ontario in 2004. A few years later, teaming with Merilyn Simonds, she helped professionalize the Kingston WritersFest. I met with Leslie and Jan in Kingston to talk about Mel Hurtig and his legacy as bookseller, publisher and patriot.

Bruce Fye is an American retired cardiologist, medical historian, writer, bibliophile and philanthropist. He is emeritus professor of medicine and the history of medicine at the Mayo Clinic, and was the founding director of the institution's W. Bruce Fye Center for the History of Medicine, named by the Clinic in his honour as a result of his philanthropy. In addition to building up a large collection of books, offprints, and autographs relating to the history of cardiology, and to Sir William Osler during his lifetime, Fye has been a collector of prints and engravings relating to medicine and the portraits of physicians. In 2016, he donated many of his books to the Mayo Clinic. We met in Montreal, during an American Olser Society meeting, to discuss book collecting and Bruce's life as a book collector.

Christopher Lyons, is the head librarian of rare books and special collections at McGill University's McLennan Library. He was formerly in charge of McGill's Osler Library which holds the collection of it's founder, Sir William Osler (1849–1919). A major figure in modern medical history, Osler is "well known as a scientific researcher, a great medical pedagogue, a humanist, and an advocate for a patient-centered approach to medicine." "Born in Ontario and educated at McGill University...where he taught from 1874 until 1884 before leaving to join the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, and then to become one of the "Big Four" founders of Johns Hopkins Hospital and medical school in Baltimore...he finished his career as Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford University, where he was also able to devote time to his passion for book collecting." Chris and I met at his offices in Montreal to talk about Osler the medical book collector.

Ambassador Bruce Heyman is an American businessman and served as United States Ambassador to Canada under Barack Obama from 2014 until 2017. He appears regularly on CBC, Fox Business, Bloomberg, CTV, CNBC, and other media outlets as an expert on trade and bilateral issues. Bruce lives in Chicago with his wife and co-author Vicki Heyman who was an American cultural envoy in Canada, leading cross-border conversations and programs related to the arts, social innovation and youth engagement. She is on the board of the Council for Canadian American Relations, Chicago Media Project, and the international advisory board of C2 Montreal. Vicki lives in Chicago where she and Bruce are co-founders of Uncharted LLC. We met in Montreal to discuss their new book The Art of Diplomacy: Strengthening the Canada-U.S. Relationship in Times of Uncertainty. Among other things we talk about marriages, Justin Trudeau, Donald Trump, the arts, beehives, political books, indigenous culture; who has friendlier waitresses - the U.S. or Canada?; the Keystone pipeline, Tim Bits, and Goldman Sachs.

Bob Rae is senior counsel with the law firm Olthuis, Kleer Townshend and teaches public policy and governance at the University of Toronto. He was the Member of Parliament for Toronto Centre and was the interim leader of the Liberal Party of Canada from 2011 to 2013. He was previously leader of the Ontario New Democratic Party and the 21st Premier of Ontario, from 1990 until 1995. Between 1978 and 2013, he was elected 11 times to federal and provincial parliaments. Mr. Rae is currently Canada's special envoy to Myanmar. He has written five books, the most recent of which, What's Happened to Politics? was published in 2015, just prior to that year's Canadian federal election. We talked about the book and this year's election when we met at his offices on University Avenue in Toronto. Among other things we discuss lessons he's learned during his time in politics, how scripted and stage managed politicians are today, the undermining of parliamentary procedure, constant campaigning, partisan spin replacing meaningful policy, centralization of power in the PMO, broken promises, the rule of law, and the need for more political engagement on the part of the general public. The book serves as a blueprint for how the next Prime Minister should lead, and what policies he or she should consider introducing.

Ricardo Cayuela is a writer, essayist, and founding editor of Letras Libres ("The New Yorker of Mexico"). In 2013 he was appointed Director General of Publications by the Mexican government. Today he is the president of Random House-Mondadori-Alfaguara and Editorial Director of Penguin Random House México. We met at the Blue Met Literary Festival in Montreal to talk about, among other things, Mexico's efforts to promote reading and books; bookstores in Mexico City, fine press books; violence against journalists; his book The Mexico that Hurts, Octavio Paz, and Malcolm Lowry.

Jody Wilson-Raybould, also known by her initials JWR and by her Kwak'wala name Puglaas, is a Canadian politician and the Independent Member of Parliament for the riding of Vancouver Granville. She served as Minister of Justice and Attorney General in the cabinet of Justin Trudeau from 2015 until January 2019 and then as Minister of Veterans Affairs of Canada from January 14, 2019, until resigning on February 12, 2019. Before entering federal politics, she was a provincial Crown Prosecutor in Vancouver, a Treaty Commissioner and Regional Chief of the B.C. Assembly of First Nations. Wilson-Raybould studied at the University of Victoria and later at the University of British Columbia. She lives with her husband Tim Raybould in Vancouver. We met in Ottawa the day after her book From Where I Stand, Rebuilding Indigenous Nations for a Stronger Canada was launched and talked, among other things, about telling the truth in politics - the whole truth; about exactly what 'title' means; about launching a book in the middle of an election; about keeping promises, Justin Trudeau and SNC Lavalin, Alberto Manguel, Conrad Black, the Royal Proclamation of 1763, Confederation, assimilation, the Charter of Rights, the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People, reconciliation, indigenous self government, community development, revenue sharing, spousal travel, and creating a more 'just society'.

Cory Doctorow is an activist, science fiction author and co-editor of the blog Boing Boing. He is also a special advisor to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He favours liberalising copyright laws and is a proponent of the Creative Commons organization, using some of their licences for his books, the most recent of which is called Radicalizing, four SF novellas "connected by social, technological, and economic visions of today and what America could be in the near, near future." I met with Cory in Ottawa after he'd appeared at the Ottawa International Writers Festival. We talk primarily about book publishing, the new EU copyright directive and the practice of writing Science Fiction.

Claudia Piñeiro is an Argentine novelist and television scriptwriter best known for writing literary crime novels, most of which are best sellers in Latin America. She was born in Buenos Aires and has won numerous literary prizes including the German LiBeraturpreis for Elena Sabe and the Clarin Prize for fiction for Thursday Night Widows. Four of her novels have been translated into English by Bitter Lemon Press, all of which have been adapted into feature films. We met at The Blue Met Literary Festival (Claudia was awarded the 2019 Premio Azul, Blue Met's Spanish-language prize) in Montreal to talk about, among other things, Edgar Allan Poe, G.K. Chesterton and detective stories; literary prizes, and the difference between writing novels and television series screenplays.

Born in Buenos Aires in 1948, Alberto Manguel grew up in Tel-Aviv, where his father served as the first Argentinian ambassador to Israel. At sixteen, while working at the Pygmalion bookshop in Buenos Aires, he was asked by the blind Jorge Luis Borges to read aloud to him at his home. Manguel left Argentina for Europe before the horrors of the 'disappeared' began, and just after the events of May 1968. During the 1970s he lived a peripatetic life in France, England, Italy, and Tahiti, reviewing, translating, editing, and always reading. In the 1980s he moved to Toronto where he lived and raised his three children. He became a Canadian citizen and continues to identify his nationality as first and foremost Canadian. In 2000, Manguel purchased with his partner and renovated a medieval presbytery in the Poitou-Charentes region of France to house his 30,000 books. They left France for New York in 2015. He has received many prizes, was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and honorary doctorates from the universities of Liège, in Belgium, Anglia Ruskin in Cambridge, UK, and York and Ottawa in Canada. He is a Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (France). We met in Montreal at the Blue Met Literary Festival to talk about his latest book Packing My Library (published by Yale University Press). The conversation turns to Canadian politics and Jody Wilson Raybould at about the 42 minute mark and rages on and off from there to the finish. It's a passionate exchange about justice and honesty, and how literature informs real life.

David Moscrop is a political theorist and SSHRC postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Communication at the University of Ottawa. He studies democratic deliberation, political decision-making, and digital media, and is a contributing columnist for the Washington Post, and a writer for Maclean's Magazine He also provides regular political commentary for television and radio. His first book Too Dumb for Democracy? Why We Make Bad Political Decisions and How We Can Make Better Ones was published by Goose Lane Editions in March 2019. We met at the University of Ottawa to discuss his book, just in time for Canada's 2019 Federal election. Among other things we talk about the story behind the book, making smart voting decisions, Twitter, literary agent Chris Bucci, CBC Ideas; good, rational, autonomous thinking; diverse, trusted news sources; emotional biases, negative political advertising, threats to democracy, partisanship, SNC Lavalin, Jody Wilson Raybould, the importance of investing time in order to understanding politics, bots, good citizenship, voting on principle versus strategically, party discipline, and adopting proportional representation. And for you non-political types: it's a lot more interesting than this makes it sound.

Although E.K. Brown, a highly admired literary critic, once called poet and bureaucrat Duncan Campbell Scott "one of the chief masters of Canadian literature," Scott's reputation today lies in tatters. Mark Abley in his fascinating biography Conversations with a Dead Man, The Legacy of Duncan Campbell Scott, explains why. I met with him at his home in Point Claire near Montreal - where the ghost of Scott appeared. We talk, among others things, about boarding schools, Canada's residential school system, "genocide," the Department of Indian Affairs, Sir John A. MacDonald, forms of biography, assimilation, the "Indian Problem," and Scott's poetry, notably a sonnet to an "Onondaga Madonna."

Mordecai: The Life and Times has been called the 'award-winningest' book in Canadian literary history. I met with its author Charles Foran to talk about its subject Mordecai Richler. The guts, aggression, honesty and pride of the man - a man who did things, who wrote to stimulate conversation, and argument, who was socially engaged, who asked hard, uncomfortable questions. We also discuss Richler's similarities to Pierre Trudeau. His taking on a whole movement over Quebec's sign laws; his desire to write the best novel ever written, least one book that would last; about Montreal, its tensions, and his loyalty to it; and about Canadian culture, digitization and the loss of literary life. This interview was conducted in June, 2012

Kit Maude is a Spanish-to-English translator. He received a bachelor's degree in Comparative American Studies from the University of Warwick. In 2009 he moved to Buenos Aires where he currently lives. His translations have been featured in Granta, the Literary Review, the Short Story Project, and other publications. We met at the Falena bookstore/wine bar in the Chacarita neighbourhood of Buenos Aires to talk literary tourism over a glass. Here's our conversation (the bookstore we reference that was once a performing arts theater, then a cinema, is called El Ateneo Grand Splendid).

Jonathan Rose is the William R. Kenan Professor of History at Drew University in Madison, NJ. His fields of study are British history, intellectual history and the history of the book (in which he happens to be a giant). His books include The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes and The Literary Churchill: Author, Reader, Actor both of which won important prizes. He has held visiting appointments at the University of Cambridge and Princeton University and he reviews books for the The Times Literary Supplement and the Daily Telegraph. Most important viz our purposes: he was the founding president of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP), and for many years, co-editor of its journal 'Book History'. I met with Jonathan at SHARP'S annual conference in Amherst, MA #Sharp19, to talk about his role in establishing the society. We also chat about SHARP'S history, purpose, future, and noticeable vibrancy, about the importance of history text books; Gone with the Wind; JFK, and Playboy magazine (okay, the last only in passing).

Ana María Cabanellas began her career as a lawyer, after which she joined the family-owned publishing company Editorial Heliasta as a partner. In 1979, she became President of Editorial Claridad which specializes in legal dictionaries, as well as fiction, philosophy and history. In 2006, Ms Cabanellas founded UnaLuna, which publishes children's books. Over the years she has been extremely active in industry associations. For example, she is currently Vice- president of CADRA (Centro de Administración de Derechos Reprográficos Asociación Civil), Argentina's RRO, and Chair of the Latin American and Caribbean Committee of IFRRO. Previously, she served as President of the Cámara Argentina del Libro for seven years, was Secretary and then President of GIE from 1991-2004, and President of the International Publishers Association from 2004-2008. She speaks frequently at publishing events around the world. In 2012, the Buenos Aires Book Fair named her one of the "50 most influential people in publishing in the Spanish Language." We met at her offices in BA to talk about her career, her vision, publishing in Argentina, copyright, peace, education and children's books, among many other things.

Series: Biblio File in Buenos Aires Liliana Heker was born in 1943 in Buenos Aires. Her writing career began at age 17 thanks to a letter she wrote Abelardo Castillo requesting a job at a magazine he edited. During Argentina's so called Dirty War in the seventies and eighties, she defiantly wrote and edited several well known left-wing literary journals, subtly protesting her country's violent, repressive regime, while defending the practice of literature. She also famously engaged in correspondence with Julio Cortázar, arguing that resistance to tyranny is better staged at home where the people can read your work and take faith from it, rather than from abroad. This from Biblioasis: "She is the author of two novels and numerous books of short stories and essays, in addition to being a founder of two important Argentine literary magazines. Her collected short stories were published in Spanish in 2004 and translated into Hebrew; her stories have been included in anthologies in many countries and languages. Her collection, The Stolen Party and Other Stories, is available in English. Her novel The End of the Story was not only a literary success, but a cultural event that provoked controversy and avid discussion of how best to remember the years of the Argentine dictatorship." I met Liliana at her home in Buenos Aires to talk about all of the above, and more. Her collection of short stories, Please Talk to Me, translated by Alberto Manguel and Miranda France, is available from Yale University Press

Series: Biblio File in Buenos Aires Guillermo Martínez is an Argentine novelist, detective fiction and short story writer. He earned a PhD in mathematical logic from the University of Buenos Aires, after which he worked for two years in a postdoctoral position at the Mathematical Institute, in Oxford. His most successful novel is Crímenes Imperceptibles known as The Oxford Murders, written in 2003. He was awarded the Planeta Prize for this novel, which was adapted into a film in 2008, directed by Alex de la Iglesia, and starring John Hurt and Elijah Wood. We met in his apartment in Buenos Aires to discuss how mathematics and Borges have informed his novel and detective fiction writing.

Tania Craan's career as an art director and designer spans more than three decades. For the past 25 years, she has run her freelance graphic design studio. She started her career working as a designer at Penguin Books Canada and then went on to McClelland & Stewart where she became art director. In addition to books, she has designed stamps for Canada Post, three Ontario Provincial Government inquiry reports, and annual reports for a variety of corporate clients. She "blends the disciplines of publication design with an appreciation of how readers actually navigate pages and their content — into visually pleasing, highly readable communication pieces." I met with Tania at her home near Kingston, Ontario. We talk in this interview about her career - notably her time with McClelland and Stewart - her transition from employee to freelancer, and a selection of the books she is most proud of having designed.

Eimear McBride is an Irish novelist whose debut novel, A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing, won the inaugural Goldsmiths Prize in 2013 and the 2014 Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction. She wrote the book in six months, but it took nine years to get it published. Galley Beggar Press of Norwich finally picked it up in 2013. The novel is written in a stream of consciousness-like style and tells the story of a young woman's complex relationship with her family. McBride's second novel The Lesser Bohemians was published in September 2016. Set in Camden Town in the 1990s, it tells the story of the turbulent relationship between an eighteen year old drama student and a thirty-eight year old actor. In 2017 McBride was awarded the inaugural Creative Fellowship of the Beckett Research Centre, University of Reading. We met in Montreal - where she was, at the invitation of the School of Irish Studies at Concordia University - to talk about her work, and her experience getting it published.

David Robinson is executive director of the Canadian Association of University Teachers. He has been with CAUT since 1999, when he was first hired as director of communications. Prior to joining CAUT, Robinson was the senior economist with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, Canada's leading pro­gressive think-tank. He has also been a lecturer at Simon Fraser University, and Carleton University in Ottawa. He is the author of numerous articles, reviews, and reports on higher education and research policy, vocational education and training, and international trade and investment agreements. I met with him at his offices in Ottawa to talk about the Canadian government's current review of copyright policy.

Ken Lopez is a renowned antiquarian bookseller who deals in rare books, specializing in modern literary first editions. He regularly issues catalogs of modern literature and less regularly, of native American literature, the literature of the Vietnam war and the 1960s, and nature writing. He also has an established record of placing authors' archives in institutional collections. Ken is a former President of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America. He operates out of Hadley, Massachusetts, where I met him to talk about, among other things, collecting books about the Vietnam War, grunts, Tim O'Brien, Raymond Carver, Mario Puzo's 'sleeping with the fishes,' native American literature, climate fiction, nature writing, John Burroughs, wildlife photography, the social value of book collecting, asking the question of your collection 'is it something people/scholars can learn from?' author archives, the importance of association copies, Ken Kesey, the editor's copy of the proofs of The Lord of the Rings, Michael Ondaatje's archive at the Harry Ransom Center, and learning throughout life.

In 1967 Barry Moser moved from Tennessee to New England to teach at The Williston Academy in Easthampton, Massachusetts. He was soon introduced to Leonard Baskin with whom he studied at Baskin's Gehenna Press. In the spring of 1969 Moser was commissioned to illustrate a trade book, The Flowering Plants of Massachusetts (it wasn't published until 1979). He became fascinated with plants and plant lore and as a result named his press Pennyroyal (Mentha pulegium). It produced a small number of books over the next decade. In 1977 Moser met Andrew Hoyem, who asked if Moser would be interested in illustrating the Arion Press's forthcoming Moby-Dick. He was, he did, and it was published to great fanfare. I'll let Barry pick it up from here. We met at his home in North Hatfield, Massachusetts, and talked, among other things, about the differences between a booksmith and a bookwright, print making and illustration. About drawing and sailing, short-lived religion and agnosticism; music as religion; opposites working together as a unit, woodcuts and Leonard Baskin; the Thomas Mosher Press; Harold McGrath; art's relationship to money; the Pennyroyal Caxton Bible, David Godine; collecting Barry's work: Frankenstein, Moby Dick, Pennyroyals and trade titles, the Jump books; the distinctiveness of Barry's work; The Andrew Hoyem/Arion Press Moby Dick controversy; and the unfinished Dante's Inferno.

Carey Cranston took on the role of President of the American Writers Museum in September of 2016. Prior to that Carey served for 12 years as President of Fox College, a private career college in Chicago, and prior to that he was a Vice President at Hill & Knowlton, a global PR firm, where he led the digital and web services division We met at the Museum, and talked about, among other things, the Museum's mission, Frederick Douglass, The Great Gatsby, writing as a concept writ large, the written word, Bob Dylan, song writing, Alan Light,identity, an American voice, immigrant stories, Tupac, deceased authors, promoting the present, the "book cloud," fun, Museum founder Malcolm O'Hagan, the Dublin Writers Museum, the Declaration of Independence, the importance of ideas, the On the Road scroll, the joys of digital, Amaze Design, dust jackets, school groups, typewriters, and inspiration.

David McKnight is an accomplished librarian and book collector, "imbued with remarkable passion and resolve." As Director of the Rare Book and Manuscript Library (RBML), at the University of Pennsylvania David is responsible for insuring stewardship, management, discovery, and preservation of the collection and for maintaining the visibility of RBML within and outside of the Penn community. At the Penn Libraries, he has also served as Curator of the Schoenberg Center for Electronic Text and Image. Before coming to Penn, he headed the Rare Books and Special Collections Division at McGill University Libraries and was the Principal Librarian at McGill's Humanities and Social Sciences Library. He is the author of Experiment, Printing the Canadian Imagination: Highlights from the David McKnight Canadian Little Magazine and Small Press Collection. McKnight invested 30 years in developing this collection, one that has "considerable potential for literary research in the areas of Canadian Modernist poetry, avant-garde literature, and the production of small magazines in Canada." He generously donated the collection to the University of Alberta Libraries in 2012, and this catalogue was published in 2018 to accompany an exhibition held at the Bruce Peel Special Collections Library. David and I met in Montreal to talk about his experience amassing this essential collection. Among other things we discuss Ken Norris's Little Magazine in Canada 1925-80, Roy MacSkimming's The Perilous Trade, disappointment in Library and Archives Canada, New Wave Canada: The Coach House Press and the small press movement in English Canada in the 1960s, Carl Spadoni, Merrill Distad, wives of book collectors, fine presses, literary experiment, Adrian King-Edwards and The Word Bookstore in Montreal, bill bissett, bp nichol, Mac Jamieson, TISH, Bill Hoffer, j.w. curry, Nicky Drumbolis, Nelson Ball's catalogues, Wynne Francis's correspondence, Contact Press, Vehicule Press, Quebecois magazines, and The Gotham Bookmart exhibition.

Levi Stahl is the marketing director of the University of Chicago Press and the editor of The Getaway Car: A Donald E. Westlake Nonfiction Miscellany. We met in Chicago to discuss the role of the book marketer, getting books out into the world and bought, helping the sales department, Thoreau, content and numbers, advertising and the price point of books, print on demand and short runs, shelf and display space, disseminating scholarship, advances, authenticity, and advice for authors on how to use social media.

Wayson Choy was born in Vancouver in 1939. He spent his childhood in the city's Chinatown and subsequently attended the University of British Columbia where he studied creative writing. He moved to Toronto in 1962, and taught at Humber College from 1967 to 2004. His novel The Jade Peony (1995) won the Trillium Book Award and the City of Vancouver Book Award. His novel All That Matters, was published in 2004. I interviewed him about it some years later in Ottawa. Our conversation was among the first I recorded for the Biblio File. During it we talk about a range of topics, including the immigrant experience, conflicting cultural values, the language of the heart, tradition, butterflies, grandmothers, the colonial system, "the other," wisdom and storytelling, extended families, television, ancestors, elders and sons, obedience, ghosts, short leaders and actors, community, doing the right thing, luck, important things being invisible, internalized oppressions, banquet tables, and bananas. Regrettably our conversation cuts off at about the 33 minute mark, but I nonetheless wanted to post it to mark Wayson's passing. He died today, April 29th, 2019 at the age of 80. RIP.

James Pollock is the author of Sailing to Babylon, which was a finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Governor General's Literary Award in Poetry, and You Are Here: Essays on the Art of Poetry in Canada, a finalist for the ForeWord Review's Book of the Year Award for a collection of essays. He is also the editor of The Essential Daryl Hine, which made The Partisan's list of the best books of 2015. His poems have been published in The Paris Review, AGNI, Poetry Daily, the National Post, and other journals in the U.S. and Canada. I met with James in his home in Madison, WI to talk about You are Here. Topics discussed include blindness to Canadian poetry, the importance of anthologies, bad poetry, meter, rhyme, Robert Frost, argument, philosophers, poet-critics, autobiography in poetry, myth, Adam Kirsch, authenticity versus technique, rhetoric, poetry in totalitarian regimes, Michael Lista, Carmine Starnino; constructive, honest reviews, Eric Ormsby, and the need for a great anthology of Canadian poetry.

As the editor of Rain Taxi Review of Books, Eric Lorberer is responsible for the voice and style that has brought the magazine widespread acclaim. He is also the director of the Twin Cities Book Festival, has served as a panelist for the National Endowment for the Arts, and speaks at conferences and literary festivals around the country as an advocate for independent publishing and literary culture. We met at his home in Minneapolis to discuss Rain Taxi's history and the literary events it puts on, the Twin Cities Book Festival, championing printed books, the current fixation on screens and devices, best-sellers, small press publishers, literary presses in Minneapolis, sharing books, technology and literary experiences, the Twin Cities Literary Calendar, being useful, Independent Bookstore Day and France.

Eric Ormsby is a poet, a writer, and a man of letters. He was a longtime resident of Montreal, where he was the Director of University Libraries and subsequently a professor of Islamic thought at McGill University Institute of Islamic Studies. Presently, he lives and writes in France and Prague. Ormsby began writing poetry as a young man and began publishing in 1985. He has produced six poetry collections, among them Bavarian Shrine and Other Poems (1990), which won a Quebec prize for the best poetry of that year, Coastlines (1992), and Time's Covenant: Selected Poems (2006). His poems have been published in various journals and magazines such as The New Yorker and The Paris Review and anthologized in The Norton Anthology of Poetry. He has also authored a book of criticism called Fine Incisions, which we talked about when we got together in Montreal. Among other things we discuss the art of book reviewing, his aesthetic criteria, honesty, negative reviews, W.B.Yeats, Shakespeare and Eric's grandmother, standards and touchstones, Montreal, Canadian book design, William Logan, the first and last lines of a review, justice, personal affiliations, Tolstoy, War and Peace, self-revelation, translation, and the poet Daryl Hine. To finish off, Eric reads several of his poems.

Will Rueter is the proprietor of the Aliquando Press which was founded in 1962 "to enable its proprietor to learn the basics of printing and binding books by hand." To date the Press has produced 109 books. It is located in Dundas, Ontario. Thomas James Cobden-Sanderson was a renowned British bookbinder, and passionate private printer. He was proprietor of the Doves Press, one of the most influential private presses of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Its standards of quality have influenced commercial and fine presses for more than a century. I met with Will at his workshop in Dundas to talk about his press, and Cobden-Sanderson. Among other things we discuss bookbinding, dinner with William Morris, the Doves Press, Emery Walker, Doves' type, Bessie Hooley, Majesty, Beauty and Order, red ink, Jim Rimmer, patterns and ornaments, Elbert Hubbard, Leonard Barr, Paul Dinsing, Rollin Milroy and his Heavenly Monkey Press, the Hogarth Press, the Nonesuch Press, polymer plates, Massey College, "The Seafarer", printing and emotion; responsibility, sincerity, and connection with the words and the author.

Steven Temple is an antiquarian bookseller who, after operating shops on Queen Street in Toronto for forty years, moved to Welland, Ontario in 2014 where he now does business out of his home. He continues to specialize in literary books, especially Canadian literary books, general Canadiana, and select out-of-print and rare books in various fields. We met at his home in Welland, where we discussed, among other things, his passion for finding "lost" Canadian literature, parasites on the Internet, the urgency to buy, poet Frank Prewett, rarity, utility bills, stories about books, examples of lost Canadian literature, Watters's Checklist of Canadian Literature, Steven's criteria for buying books, Robertson Davies, William Golding, Graham Greene, Alice Munro, Margaret Atwood, collecting the Governor General's Award for Fiction winners, G. Herbert Sallans's Little Man, artist Fred Varley, Canadian book design, being a pioneer, and patronizing Canada Post.

James King is the author of six novels and nine biographies, including books on David Milne, Margaret Laurence, Jack McClelland, and Lawren Harris. His biography of Herbert Read, The Last Modern, was nominated for the Governor General's Literary Award. A fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, James lives in Hamilton, Ontario. And that's where I met him to discuss his biography of Jack McClelland, Jack, A Life with Writers. Among other things we talk of publicizing Canadian authors, happy childhoods, Patrick Crean, Esi Edugyan, magnetic personalities, P.T. Barnum, swearing, multi-national publishing houses, Canadian literature, Gabriel Roy, Margaret Laurence, Mordecai Richler, the New Canadian Library, editing, approbation, publishing poetry, Avie Bennett, the dangers of promoting Canadian culture, Alfred and Blanche Knopf, Bennett Cerf, James Laughlin, curiosity, Alice Munro, Michael Snow, Lauren Harris, The Handover, Dundurn Press, and naming Canada's national library after Jack McClelland.

Darrel J. McLeod is Cree from treaty eight territory in Northern Alberta. Before deciding to pursue writing in his retirement, he was a chief negotiator of land claims for the federal government and executive director of education and international affairs with the Assembly of First Nations. His memoir Mamaskatch: A Cree Coming of Age won the 2018 Governor General's Literary Award for non-fiction. We met at the Canada Council's offices in Ottawa to discuss it, along with negotiating land claims and arguing for concessions; residential schools; catholic priests, sexual abuse and the fear of God. The United church, the Evangelical church, listening to birds; music; non-binary definitions of gender; traditional native foods, fish heads, red willow shoots, and moose thigh bones. Death. Unconditional love. Alcohol and weakness. And stand-up comedy.

Marvin Post is the owner of Attic Books in London, Ontario - one of the largest, most successful used/antiquarian bookstores in Canada. I met with Marvin to discuss the reasons behind his success. Among other things we talk about buying lots of books, religious books, double downsizing, millennial debt-load, fresh stock, on-line versus in-store stock, buying buildings, skulls on shirts, shows, areas to collect in, medical books, books as investments, books into movies, fake signatures, storage units, and enjoying your life. Marvin also provides commentary on a selection of used books that I brought into the store for trade.

Sarah Henstra is a professor of English literature at Ryerson University in Toronto where she teaches courses in Gothic Horror, Fairy Tales & Fantasies, Psychoanalysis & Literature, and Creative Writing. She is the author of The Red Word, a novel that recently won the Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction. We met in Ottawa to talk about The Red Word. Among other things we discuss The Scarlet Letter, shame, the double standard, Greek mythology, unspoken assumptions, #metoo, feminism, frats houses, university life, the 1990s, passive characters and withholding sex.

HEATHER O'NEILL is a novelist, short-story writer and essayist. Her work, which includes Lullabies for Little Criminals, The Girl Who Was Saturday Night and Daydreams of Angels, has been shortlisted for the Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction, the Orange Prize for Fiction and the Scotiabank Giller Prize in two consecutive years, and has won CBC Canada Reads, the Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction and the Danuta Gleed Award. Born and raised in Montreal, O'Neill lives there today with her daughter. And it's there that I met with her to discuss her 2017 CLC Kreisel Lecture published in 2018 by The University of Alberta Press as Wisdom in Nonsense - Invaluable Lessons From My Father. Among other things we talk about hating and loving your life, happiness and wonder, relationships with your parents dead and alive, memoirs versus fiction, truth, abuse and #metoo and witnesses, the legal system and power, Concordia, lying to tell the truth, editing the real world, heads being eaten off by dragons, magical radical worlds, deception versus folly, pretending, class, ignoring fathers' advice, metaphors, loneliness, ugly babies, conventional versus internal beauty, clowns, collecting, stealing cheese, Montreal's Plateau neighbourhood, and roses.

Katharine Streip received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of California at Berkeley. She has published essays on Marcel Proust, Jean Rhys, Philip Roth, and William S. Burroughs. Her research interests include comedy, the novel, 19th c. Paris and modernism. I'm sitting in on some of her classes at Concordia University's Liberal Arts College, which offers "a unique Great Books, multidisciplinary Core Curriculum designed to provide the foundations of an education for life." Here, as part of The Biblio File Book Club, we discuss Homer's Odyssey, and with it topics including revenge, Quentin Tarantino, home and family, identity, the slaughter of suitors, the craving for experience, the desire to learn, curiosity, intelligence, problem solving, Penelope, gifts, the practice of hospitality, sacred strangers, recklessness, repetition in texts, double standards, suspicion, character arcs, women as betrayers, and the "wine blue" sea. 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.

Sophie Schneideman has been an international rare book and print dealer for over 28 years, serving a long apprenticeship at Maggs Bros, an eminent book firm in Mayfair, and dealing as Sophie Schneideman Rare Books since 2007. She specializes in several areas of book collecting, the main focus being the Art of the Book, i.e. book illustration, private presses, fine binding, fine printing and livres d'artistes, particularly of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This includes prints and books by important illustrators, photographers and graphic artists. We met at her London studio and talked about dealing with beautiful things, starting a business, 'running' books, sniffing around and meeting people, having an international mindset, the best bookfairs, researching and cataloguing beautiful books and getting stories out of them, selling what you love, the Golden Cockerel Press, Doves Press, always buying the best copy, ephemera, trophy hunters, book collecting prizes, imperfections, the Ashendene Press, Cobden-Sanderson, books, harmony and the cosmos, the Kelmscott Press, the Nonesuch Press, limitations and rarity, the Folio Society, the Limited Editions Club, Gaylord Schanilec, Ron King at the Circle Press, and the Old School Press.

Henry Hitchings is an author, reviewer and critic, specializing in narrative non-fiction, with a particular emphasis on language and cultural history. His second book, The Secret Life of Words: How English Became English, won the 2008 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. He is the president of the Johnson Society of Lichfield. As of 2018, he is chair of the drama section of the UK's Critics' Circle. He was a King's Scholar at Eton College before going to Christ Church, Oxford, and then to University College London to research his PhD on Samuel Johnson. In 2016 Hitchings edited a collection of original essays about bookshops, entitled Browse: The World in Bookshops. Its contributors included Alaa Al Aswany, Stefano Benni, Michael Dirda, Daniel Kehlmann, Andrey Kurkov, Yiyun Li, Pankaj Mishra, Dorthe Nors, Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor, Ian Sansom, Elif Shafak, Iain Sinclair, Ali Smith, Sasa Stanisic and Juan Gabriel Vasquez. We met in London to talk about Browse, and our experiences in bookstores around the world.

I met with members of the Canada Council's Supporting Artistic Practice Program team last month to discuss changes made in 2017 to the literary book publishing grant program. Among other things we talk about the fact that programs are designed to benefit all Canadians, about phases in the spectrum of activities in artistic creation, supporting writers versus book production, professional development for arts professionals, new opportunities for literary publishers to get funding, the digital strategy fund, whether or not publishing is an artistic endeavour, literary non-fiction, Ken Whyte and Procupine's Quill, filling in profiles, project grants, core support and juries. * Please note that Guylaine Normandin is no longer with the Canada Council.

The Bookseller is a British magazine reporting news on the publishing industry. In 2010 it was acquired from Nielsen by its then Managing Director, Nigel Roby, who is now Chief Executive, Owner and Publisher of the new, expanded entity. I met with Nigel at The Bookseller's offices across the Thames from the Houses of Parliament, in London. Among other things we talk about the history and purpose of The Bookseller and its related enterprises; telling the trade about new books, informing rivals about their competitors' releases; quasi-catalogues; the Blitz; libraries under pressure; Waterstones; Mr. B's, Toppings and high streets; Tim Waterstones's new memoir; Blackwell's; the leveling off of e-book sales and the production value of print books; subscription book clubs; and click and collect...plus we mull over some of the hotter topics that today face the book publishing and selling world.

James Daunt is Managing Director of the Waterstones chain of bookstores in England. Has been since 2011. We met at the Piccadilly store in London to talk about, among other things, J.P. Morgan, New York, silver spoons and begging bowls, genuine passion, store energy, author event programs, bookshops as social places, a core of regular customers, identifying up-and-coming writers, booksellers who read, booksellers who treat publishers with suspicion, Waterstones not selling shelf-space, caring enthusiasm, shocking and fabulous bookshops, plastic flowers, bookseller personality, how to display books, book-selling being visual, recommending books (never more than three), Brexit, Amazon, screwing with algorithms, slippery squid, freedom to price, the perceived value of books, pre-orders, employee uniforms, changing chains, the purpose of chain bookshops, Indigo Books, introverted booksellers, poor writers, curating books, raising bookseller staff salaries, making Waterstones more like Daunt Books, returns as a measure of bad buying, dropping the apostrophe in Waterstones, demystifying Kindle, holding entertaining events, and being a fun place in the community.

Stephen Page is the Chief Executive Officer at Faber & Faber. We met at his offices in Bloomsbury, London, and invited Geoffrey Faber into the room. The three of us talk, among other things, about publishers being a race apart, comets, the unevenness of publishing, the low barriers to entry, maintaining humility, Paul Hamlyn, colour books and technological breakthroughs, the elasticity of books, e-books and the beauty of analogue, reading and shopping environments, seduction and hand-crafted books, millennials and the book as object, the Mainstreet Trading bookshop, starting the process of getting people to read a book, Milkman and the difference between originality and difficulty, "legacy" businesses, trust and relationships, providing value to writers, the 'ff' colophon and cultural value, CATS, risk and editorial impulse, Kazuo Ishiguro and honouring authors now, sales and realism, superlatives, copy and honesty, formats and creating energy, design briefs, Woody Allen, the vocation of publishing, the gift of social media, advertising, James Daunt, Waterstones, independents and Amazon, The Doves Press, and books as a life-blood of civilized humanity.

Will Atkinson is Managing Director of Atlantic Books, U.K. Prior to this he was, for many years, with Faber & Faber, serving as Director of Sales & Marketing from 2006 to 2014. During this time he spearheaded the Independent Alliance, a very successful sales organization that comprises some of the U.K.'s leading independent publishers, including Granta and Canongate. I met with Will at his offices in Bloomsbury, London. We talk here, among other things, about the Alliance (Faber, Canongate, Granta, Querus, Profile, Atlantic, Short Books, & Icon), access to book buyers, Steig Larsen, must-have books, faith and trust, selling books abroad, being misquoted, brands, car-dealerships, Waterstones' golden era, Michael Joseph, grounding, classic sales people, enthusiasm, libraries, T.S. Eliot, catalogues, book wholesalers, Gardners Books, Amazon, Call me by Your Name, the Net Book Agreement, Harry Potter, best-sellers and over-publishing, big data, the law of threes, publishing popular people, social media, Rome by Matthew Neale and fluff.

Hannah Knowles, Senior Commissioning Editor at Canongate Books in London, tells me what she does. I question her with the help of Geoffrey Faber. We talk, among others things, about track records, The Beautiful Poetry of Donald Trump, books with legs, back-lists, bestsellers, Robert Webb's How Not to be a Boy, selling rights internationally, inclusive lists, illustrated books, the right length of a book, redundant and obscure passages, the first 50 pages, popular culture, being on the writer's side, auctions, lizards and sex in Cold Skin, Rob Sears, libel, parody, the wallpaper in Canongate's London boardroom, editorial and acquisition meetings, florid style, the best literary agents, great works seeing the light of day, idealism, Tom Jones's Tired of London, Tired of Life, Gina Miller's Rise, people who live their lives for the good of others, advances (a slightly irritating and discursive diversion), I Go Quiet by David Ouimet, and the power of books to show us all that we have a place in the world.