Jason Webster is an Anglo-American crime novelist, travel writer and critic. Born in California he now lives in Valencia, Spain. Webster was educated in England, Egypt and Italy. In 1993 he graduated from Oxford University (St John's College) with a degree in Arabic and Islamic History. His books all involve Spain, and include Duende: A journey in search of Flamenco (2003), which recounts his move here, and his quest to learn flamenco guitar, (it was long-listed for the Guardian First Book Award...
Oct 27, 2012•31 min
Shared Inquiry is a discussion method employed by the Great Books Foundation, which, according to its website provides " a teaching and learning environment, and a way for individuals to achieve a more thorough understanding of a text by discussing questions, responses, and insights with fellow readers. Shared Inquiry combines a sound theoretical base with proven strategies to engage all readers in higher-order thinking and collaborative problem solving. In Shared Inquiry, participants come toge...
Oct 16, 2012•12 min
While researching an article on Literary Tourism for an upcoming issue of Ontario magazine , I got to meet and greet some stellar Canadian authors at sites across the province that feature, variously, in their works. Here, it's Terry Fallis, and his novel The Best Laid Plans . I got together with Terry on Parliament Hill, right next to the newly refurbished parliamentary library to talk about how its 'hallowed hallways' informed the writing of his book; about how readers might gain insight into ...
Oct 14, 2012•17 min
Attention Literary Tourists! I met with Kristi Beer from Inprint Houston , a non-profit organization dedicated to inspiring readers and writers in Houston, Texas. Founded in 1983, Inprint fulfills its mission through the nationally renowned Margarett Root Brown Reading Series, the Cool Brains! Reading Series for Young People, literary and educational activities in the community that demonstrate the value and impact of creative writing, and support for the University of Houston Creative Writing P...
Oct 14, 2012•15 min
Randall Speller was for 29 years a librarian in the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto. Combining his career in art librarianship with an interest in Canadian literature and book collecting, he has done extensive research into the history of Canadian book illustration and design, especially in the years following World War II. Randall is a contributing editor to the DA: a Journal of the Printing Arts, where he has written several influential articles on book illustration and design. Randall is al...
Oct 12, 2012•27 min
Houston's Museum of Printing History was founded in 1979 by Raoul Beasley, Vernon P. Hearn, Don Piercy, and J. V. Burnham, four printers with a passion for preserving their various printing-related collections and sharing them with the community. Chartered in 1981 the Museum had its official opening in 1982 with Dr. Hans Halaby, Director of the Gutenberg Museum in Mainz, Germany, cutting the ribbon. The mission of the Museum is to promote, preserve, and share the knowledge of printed communicati...
Oct 11, 2012•24 min
In 1927, Ben Bass opened Strand Book Store on Fourth Avenue, home of New York’s legendary Book Row. Named after the famous publishing street in London, the Strand was one of 48 bookstores on Book Row, which started in the 1890’s and ran from Union Square to Astor Place. Today, the Strand is the sole survivor. ("Ben’s son, Fred, was learning the family business by the age of 13. He too a lover of books quickly took to the book trade. After Fred completed a tour of duty in the Armed Forces, he cam...
Oct 05, 2012•22 min
Project Bookmark Canada is a national charitable organization that marks places where real and imagined landscapes meet. It does this by installing poster sized ceramic plaques - called Bookmarks - in the exact physical locations where literary scenes are set. Its mission is to develope a network of hundreds of Bookmarks in cities, towns and other areas across the country, allowing Canadians and visitors the chance to read their way across Canada. Its mandate is to promote Canadian writers and w...
Oct 03, 2012•12 min
Adam Barrows is a Professor in the English Department at Carleton University in Ottawa. The focus of his research for the last eight years has been the relationship between time, literary modernism, and imperialism. His background is in the history of science and his theoretical approach to literature is largely historical materialist, drawing heavily on the Western Marxist tradition, from the Frankfurt School to Raymond Williams and Henri Lefebvre. Growing out of his interest in twentieth-centu...
Aug 29, 2012•47 min
Terry Cook received a Ph.D. in Canadian History from Queen's University, 1977. From 1975 to 1998, he worked at the then Public, later National, Archives of Canada, leaving as the senior manager responsible for directing the appraisal and records disposition program for all media. In his long and distinguished career there, he was responsible for the development of policies and methodologies which dramatically altered the national archival system. In 1998, he founded Clio Consulting Inc., and sin...
Jul 26, 2012•1 hr
As weird as it might seem today, people from New York used to come up to Montreal for a good time. Gambling houses, drugs, clubs, fast women... Montreal was one of the coolest places to be in post-war North America. Fun, racy, naughty...for a few fleeting years Montreal had a real Noir vibe. A handful of cheap, disposable novels captured this era in ways that more main stream novels never could. According to literary historian Brian Busby, their colour and detail provide an important historical ...
Jul 16, 2012•19 min
While there is no ‘great Houston Novel,’ a lot of good stories have come out of the city, many of which are told in David Theis’s Literary Houston, an anthology of writing on and about 'the Bayou city'. Stories, because Houston is a place where people come to DO things. ‘To fly to the moon, create empires, build fortresses against cancer, and temples to surrealism’ as Theis puts it. I met him recently at a cafe just off Houston's busy Westheimer street. Seems like everwhere we moved something or...
Jul 11, 2012•18 min
Michele Rackham is a post doctoral fellow at Trent University. She is currently working on a digital catalogue raisonne of P.K. Irwin's (a.k.a P.K. Page) artwork that will accompany a print art book to be published by the Porcupine's Quill. Rackham recently completed a PhD at McGill University. The title of her thesis is "Between the Lines, Interartistic Modernism in Canada 1930-1960." We met at Carleton University to talk about 20th Canadian book design, and the important work that artist Betty...
Jul 05, 2012•31 min
"Heinrich Heine’s writings, poetry, and ideology delighted and enlightened me. He became a personal, meaningful experience, in the same way I feel, that private printing is a personal experience, printing meaningful things. These feelings make up the “idealistic” birth of the Heinrich Heine press” says Peter Dorn in Reader, Lover of Books, Lover of Heaven (North York Public Library, 1978. Designed by Glenn Goluska). Listen to my conversation with Peter about his Heinrich Heine Press, his immigra...
Jun 13, 2012•33 min
I met recently with literary historian Brian Busby to talk about 'Literary Montreal', poet John Glassco, plaques and the Writers' Chapel of St James the Apostle Anglican Church.
May 28, 2012•13 min
What William Toye apparently wanted most in the world after graduating from the University of Toronto in 1948, was a job in Canadian book publishing. This, Robert Fulford tells us in a recent National Post profile, was an outlandish career move since Canadian publishing barely existed. We had few publishers and they produced few books. They did little more than import American and British books, selling Bibles, dictionaries and schoolbooks to keep themselves afloat. But Toye was insistent. Says ...
May 25, 2012•27 min
This from the Poetry Foundation: "An influential figure in contemporary poetics, Ron Silliman became associated with the West Coast literary movement known as “Language poetry” in the 1960s and ‘70s. He edited In the American Tree (1986), which remains the primary Language poetry anthology, as well as penned one of the movement’s defining critical texts, The New Sentence (1987). Silliman’s prolific publishing career includes over thirty books of poetry, critical work, collaborations and antholog...
May 04, 2012•38 min
Unlike Britain, which opted to invest in public non-commercial broadcasting in the early ’60s, Canada chose a hybrid model that freed the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) to augment its Parliamentary appropriation with advertising revenues. Canada’s 1968 Broadcast Act prescribed a broadcasting system controlled by Canadians that ‘safeguards and strengthens our cultural, political, social and economic fabric, promotes unity and national identity, and provides challenging, entertaining, inf...
Apr 29, 2012•23 min
Allan Fleming was born in Toronto in 1929. At 16 he left studies at the Western Technical School to apprentice at various design firms in Toronto. He then went to England, where he soaked up lessons from some of the great British book designers. Back in Canada in 1957 he joined the typographic firm Cooper and Beatty Ltd., and was working there when the opportunity to redesign Canadian National's logo came up in 1959. In 1962 he became art director at Maclean’s magazine. He was vice-president and...
Apr 24, 2012•28 min
Brian Trehearne is a professor of English at McGill University. His teaching and research areas focus on Canadian literature to 1970, chiefly poetry. Awards and Fellowships include SSHRC Standard Research Grants, the Louis Dudek Award for Excellence in Teaching (three times) and the Arts Undergraduate Society Award for Excellence in Teaching. Publications include Canadian Poetry 1920 to 1960; Editor (2010); The Complete Poems of A.J.M. Smith, Editor, (2007); The Montreal Forties: Modernist Poetr...
Apr 06, 2012•55 min
Tim Bowling's collections of poetry include Fathom, The Book Collector , and The Memory Orchard . He has written three novels, including The Bone Sharps and The Paperboy’s Winter . Twice shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award for Poetry, Tim has won the Canadian Authors’ Association Award for Poetry and two Alberta Book Awards. In 2008, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. He lives in Edmonton, Alberta. Tim was in Ottawa for Versefest . We met to talk about his book In the Suicide's Lib...
Apr 02, 2012•41 min
Bruce Taylor is a two-time winner of the A.M. Klein Award for Poetry. He has published four books of poetry: Getting On with the Era (1987), Cold Rubber Feet (1989), and Facts (1998). He has been a teacher, a puppeteer, and a freelance journalist. He lives in Wakefield, Quebec. We met recently to talk about his most recent collection No End in Strangeness: New and Selected Poems, (Cormorant Books, 2011) and sundry other topics relating to Canadian poets and poetry....
Mar 23, 2012•41 min
Peter Cocking is a Vancouver-based graphic designer and design teacher. His wide ranging portfolio includes annual reports, airline tickets, snack-food boxes, CD packages, corporate identity programs, newspapers, and magazines. Since 2002 his focus has been on book and typographic design as art director at Douglas & McIntyre Publishing . Peter is the recipient of more than 40 awards for his design work. Peter has lectured at the national conferences of the AIGA and the AAUP, and to the Type ...
Mar 21, 2012•41 min
Born in Alberta in 1927, Robert R. Reid moved to Vancouver with his family at an early age. During his second year at the University of British Columbia he spotted a beautiful rubricated book on display in the library which inspired him to make something similar. Two years later, in 1949, he issued his first limited edition, a reprint of Alfred Waddington's The Fraser Mines Vindicated. This book was well received, and encouraged him to set up his own commercial print shop in downtown Vancouver. ...
Mar 09, 2012•42 min
Barbarian Press was established in 1977 in Kent, England where Jan and Crispin Elsted worked with Graham Williams at the Florin Press. With three flatbed hand presses and many cases of type, the couple returned home to Canada in 1978 to set up shop in Mission, British Columbia, about 50 miles east of Vancouver in the Fraser Valley. The press’s publications range from new translations of poetry and prose, Victorian melodrama, and new poetry to bibliography, illustrated classics, typography, and b...
Mar 01, 2012•55 min
“PRINTING, ILLUSTRATION, TYPE DESIGN, type-founding, type engraving, bookbinding, graphic design, stone cutting and digital type design are things that have occupied me for over seventy years, and do to this day. Excepting the bit of letter cutting in stone, these occupations have all put dinner on the table; but it has been my good fortune to have loved the work.” This is how Jim Rimmer (1934-2010) starts off his Pie Tree Press, Memories from the Composing Room Floor (Gaspereau Press, 2008) Rim...
Feb 21, 2012•16 min
The Alcuin Society’s Awards for Excellence in Book Design in Canada have been recognizing achievement since 1981. As Marlene Chan put it in the preface to the 2009 winners’catalogue, “The hallmark of the judging process in all of the Alcuin competitions is, and has always been, that each book is considered as a total entity. The discerning judges examine every aspect of each book, including the dust jacket, binding, endpapers, half-title page, copyright page, title page, page layout, typography,...
Feb 19, 2012•18 min
Monsieur Wikipedia informs us that bill bissett was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia, attended Dalhousie University (1956) and the University of British Columbia (1963–1965), and dropped out of both because of a desire 'to live as a free agent, writer and painter unencumbered by any academic constraints.' He moved to Vancouver in 1958 and five years later set up blew ointment magazine . He later launched blewointment press , which has published volumes by Cathy Ford, Maxine Gadd, bpNichol, Ken West,...
Feb 16, 2012•35 min
Will Rueter is a private printer, hand binder, instructor and printmaker living in Dundas, Ontario. He founded The Aliquando Press late in 1962. It has, to date, produced more than 100 books, and plenty of broadsides too. Rueter's work has been shown throughout North America and Japan and is held in public and private collections in North America and Europe. I met him recently at his home in Dundas to talk about, among other things, the origins of his Press, his love of printing, his Dutch print...
Feb 04, 2012•47 min
According to her website, "Charlotte Gray is one of Canada’s best-known writers, and author of eight 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." In 2008, Char...
Jan 20, 2012•36 min
