Jack Kerouac is an American icon thanks to his novel On the Road (1957). During the late 1950s, he and fellow members of the Beat generation captured something essential about the American psyche, defining a desire to break away from conformity in search of an alternative form of self-fulfillment. As William S. Burroughs once put it On the Road "sold a trillion Levis and a million espresso machines, and also sent countless kids on the road" (Charters, 1991, xxviii). One of those kids was Ottawa ...
Sep 09, 2013•1 hr 13 min
Alexander Monker is an Ottawa-based collector of Canadian poetry. I met recently with him to talk about his passion for these and other books, and to get some advise on the art of book collecting. We also talk about, among other things, the kindness and knowledge of used/antiquarian booksellers, misspelled book titles online, the Contact, Gaspereau and Apt. 9 Presses, buying what you love, Anglo-Irish novelist Charles Lever, Walter Scott, buying duplicate copies of books for trade, learning all ...
Sep 03, 2013•38 min
Abigail Rorer is a wood engraver, and the proprietor of The Lone Oak Press which publishes limited edition, fine press books using...letterpress & wood engraving. One of Abigail's most delightful books is Mimpish Squinnies: Reginald Farrer’s Short Guide to Worthless Plants . "Reginald Farrer (1880–1920) was a British plantsman, plant explorer, & prolific writer who was one of the first to promote rock gardening and alpine plants. The text of Mimpish Squinnies consists of fourteen plant d...
Aug 28, 2013•35 min
Founded in 1978, Shakespeare & Company aspires to create "a theatre rooted in the classical ideals of inquiry, balance and harmony; [and] a company that performs as the Elizabethans did — in love with poetry, physical prowess and the mysteries of the universe." Home to more than 150 artists, the company performs Shakespeare in ways which encourage collaboration between actors, directors and designers of all races, nationalities and backgrounds. It also provides training, and develops and pro...
Aug 23, 2013•25 min
When I met with Rebecca Romney she was the Rare Book Expert on Pawn Stars and Manager at the Las Vegas Gallery of Bauman Rare Books. We talked about what she does, why Bauman's is in town, her blog, Aldine, Aldus the printer, William Pickering's Aldine poet's series, and collecting fine press books.
Aug 12, 2013•40 min
The University of Nevada, Las Vegas Special Collections Library houses unique, rare, and specialized research material that documents the history, culture and physical environment of the city of Las Vegas, the Southern Nevada region, the gaming industry, and the University of Nevada Las Vegas. The collections include books, pamphlets, posters, serials and periodicals, scrapbooks, archives and manuscripts, maps, architectural drawings, photographs, video and audio tapes. I visited the library rec...
Aug 05, 2013•35 min
This part was easy. I just clipped and pasted from here. "From ornate floral patterns to cityscapes, the boldest book designs of the Golden Age are gathered here. Readers accustomed to today’s more utilitarian bindings will find breathtaking images—gold leaf patterns intricate enough to replicate the shimmer of feathers, forests rendered in rich color and silver, and elegant allusions to Asian art. The diversity and ingenuity of these books will capture the imagination of book lovers and collect...
Jul 23, 2013•19 min
Barbara Slate is the author of more than 300 comic books and graphic novels. She created, wrote and drew Angel Love for DC Comics, and Yuppies from Hell and Sweet XVI for Marvel. Her first character , Ms Liz, has appeared on millions of greeting cards, in magazines, and on the Today Show; in addition, she wrote the Disney comic classics Beauty and the Beast and Pocahontas, plus more than 60 issues of Mattel’s Barbie (winner of the Parent’s Choice Award two years in a row), and more than 100 Bett...
Jul 15, 2013•33 min
Poets House is a literary center and poetry archive - a collection and meeting place in New York that invites poets and the public to join the living tradition of poetry. Free and open to the public, Poets House’s 50,000-volume poetry library is among the most comprehensive, open-stacks collections of poetry in the United States. Hosting acclaimed poetry events and workshops, Poets House not only documents the wealth and diversity of modern poetry, it stimulates public dialogue on issues of poet...
Jun 26, 2013•25 min
The Greenwich Village Literary Pub Crawl has been leading tourists into bars rich in bookish history since 1998. Inside each bar, you take a drink and listen as your actor/tour guide tells of the history of the establishment and of the great authors who have hung out, gotten drunk and written there. You’ll get recitations from relevant texts and stops at "unique sites that are literary, historical, or alcoholic in nature." Tours start off every Saturday at 2pm, beginning at the White Horse Taver...
Jun 24, 2013•21 min
Richard Minsky is a celebrated American book artist, bookbinder and scholar who at age 13 got his first printing press. In 1968, he graduated cum laude in economics from Brooklyn College, was then awarded a fellowship at Brown University, got his Master's degree in economics, and then pursued a Ph.D. at The New School for Social Research; two years later he chucked it all for bookbinding, art and music. He studied bookbinding under master bookbinder Daniel Gibson Knowlton In 1974, Minsky founded...
Jun 21, 2013•41 min
Edward Rutherfurd was born in England, in the cathedral city of Salisbury. Educated locally, and at the universities of Cambridge, and Stanford, California, he subsequently worked in political research, bookselling and publishing. Abandoning this career in the book trade in 1983, he returned to his childhood home to write SARUM, a historical novel with a ten-thousand year storyline, set in the area around the ancient monument of Stonehenge. It was an instant international bestseller remaining 23...
Jun 13, 2013•27 min
Without question, Friedrich Nietzsche is the go-to guy for those who want to sound smart at a cocktail party. He's a philosophical superstar, ' the grandfather of postmodernism', an inspiration to thinkers such as Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Sarah Kofman, and Paul de Man. Nietzsche’s popularity lies, according to PhD candidate Karl Laderoute, in his rebelliousness and bombastic style. His aphoristic writing - with its lack of fully articulated argument - spurs students to t...
Jun 13, 2013•42 min
George Saintsbury (23 October 1845 – 28 January 1933), though a prolific and influential British literary critic in the late 1800s, is today perhaps best known as the author of a book on wine called Notes on a Cellar-Book (1920). According to Prof. Nicholas Margaritis, Saintsbury deserves a larger modern audience. Why? Listen to his explanation.
May 26, 2013•39 min
Lionel Trilling (1905 – 1975) is one of the best known U.S. critics of the twentieth century. A Professor of Literature and Criticism at Columbia University from 1931 - 1975, his teachings focused primarily on the relationships between literature, culture and politics. His first and best known collection of essays, The Liberal Imagination , was published in 1950. I met with David Southward , a Senior Lecturer at the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee, in Gatineau, Quebec at the ACTC Annual Conf...
May 20, 2013•25 min
"Longinus" is the name given to the unknown literary critic/author who wrote 'On the Sublime' an essay written around 100 CE that examines the work of more than 50 ancient authors. In the essay - of which only an extended fragment remains - Longinus talks of the sublime as a state that reaches "beyond the realm of the human condition into greater mystery." How do authors produce this state in themselves, in their work, in their readers? How do we know it when we see it? Longinus gives us his tak...
May 01, 2013•33 min
Quantum Theatre was founded in Pittsburgh in 1990 by Karla Boos. Her goal was to create a company that incorporated world culture and international trends. Quantum has been a nurturing home for Boos' evolution as an artist and for the hundreds of collaborators that have created Quantum's work. These artists draw upon the resources of image, world languages, mixed media, and the power of non-traditional performance sites. Unique to the region, Quantum's productions are staged in places that aren'...
Apr 11, 2013•14 min
Emilio Gil is a graphic designer, and founder of Tau Design a firm that pioneered design services, institutional communications, and the creation and development of visual corporate identity programs in Spain. He trained at the SVA (School of Visual Arts) in New York under professors Milton Glaser, James McMullan and Ed Benguiat, and studied curating at Central St. Martins in London. For his 1995 book ‘Un toro negro y enorme’ (An enormous black bull) Gil won the Laus de Oro award for Editorial D...
Apr 04, 2013•29 min
Strange Victories: Grove Press, 1951-1985 was a major exhibition about the Grove Press that ran at the Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Library in Syracuse. Grove was founded by Barney Rosset in 1951 and is one of the world's great twentieth-century avant-garde publishing houses. It's credited with having introduced many important international authors to American readers during the postwar period. The exhibition traced the history of the Press from its involvement in nat...
Mar 21, 2013•24 min
Mark Tredinnick , winner of the Montreal Poetry Prize (2011) and the Cardiff Poetry Prize (2012), is the author of The Blue Plateau, Fire Diary, and nine other acclaimed works of poetry and prose. He lives in the highlands southwest of Sydney, Australia. Tredinnick is “one of our great poets of place—not just of geographic place, but of the spiritual and moral landscapes as well,” according to Judith Beveridge. Of “Walking Underwater”, which won the Montreal Prize in 2011, Andrew Motion wrote: “...
Mar 16, 2013•48 min
Waiting for the Barbarians is a novel written by the South African-born Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee. Published in 1980 it won the James Tait Black Memorial and Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prizes for fiction. The book's title comes from a poem by Greek-Egyptian poet Constantine P. Cavafy. American composer Philip Glass wrote an opera based on the book which premiered in 2005. In August 2012, the Baxter Theatre in Cape Town presented Alexandre Marine's stage adaptation of the novel. The production ra...
Mar 03, 2013•31 min
I met with Canadian poet/critic Michael Lista several months ago to discuss the state of poetry reviewing in Canada, the need for honesty in criticism, and his take on poet/philosopher Jan Zwicky 's essay “The Ethics of the Negative Review,” in which she defends her practice, while review editor in the 1990s of The Fiddlehead literary journal, of not publishing negative reviews. Buckle up and enjoy the ride....
Jan 27, 2013•26 min
Robert Fowler has had a distinguished career as a Canadian diplomat and public servant. From 1989 - 1995 he was deputy minister of National Defence; from 1995 - 2000, Canada's ambassador to the United Nations, and, following that, ambassador to Italy from 2000-2006. Over the years he has served as foreign policy advisor to three Prime Ministers, and as Personal Representative for Africa. On Dec. 15, 2008, when he was in Niger as special envoy to the United Nations responsible for reconciling reb...
Jan 15, 2013•45 min
Corey Redekop has been many things: "actor, waiter, disc jockey, cameraman, editor, lawyer (almost), and now the fabled trifecta of publicist/librarian/author. His debut novel, Shelf Monkey , is either a work of insane genius or an intolerable left-wing screed, depending on which review you read. Stunningly handsome, supremely talented, superbly gifted at hyperbole, Corey abides in Fredericton, New Brunswick." We climb up on the autopsy table to dissect his latest novel Husk (" The Sopranos of z...
Jan 05, 2013•46 min
Laurie Lewis began her publishing career in New York City with Doubleday in the early 60s, acting as liaison between the book design and printing departments. In 1963 she moved to Toronto and joined the University of Toronto Press. When Allan Fleming came on board as Chief Designer in 1968 the new Design Unit was formed and Lewis became Fleming’s assistant. The department produced many important books, winning numerous awards both nationally and internationally. For her outstanding service over ...
Dec 20, 2012•46 min
According to his website , Ross King is "the bestselling author of six books on Italian, French and Canadian art and history. He has also published two historical novels, Domino (1995) and Ex-Libris (1998), and edited a collection of Leonardo da Vinci's fables, jokes and riddles. Translated into more than a dozen languages, his books have been nominated for a National Book Critics' Circle Award, the Charles Taylor Prize, and the National Award for Arts Writing. He has won both the Governor Gener...
Dec 09, 2012•42 min
Julie Bruck is the author of three collections of poems from Brick Books , Monkey Ranch (2012) The End of Travel (1999), and The Woman Downstairs (1993). Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Ms, Ploughshares, The Walrus, The Malahat Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Maisonneuve, Literary Mama, and elsewhere. Montreal-born and raised, Julie has taught at several colleges and universities in Canada, and has been a resident faculty member at The Frost Place in Franconia, New Hampshire. Since 20...
Dec 03, 2012•37 min
Born in Topeka, Kansas, Linda Spalding (née Dickinson) is a Canadian writer and editor who has, over the years, worked as a professor of English and writing at numerous universities. She currently lives in Toronto, is an editor with Brick magazine, and is married to novelist Michael Ondaatje. Spalding's novel The Purchase won the 2012 Governor-General’s Literary Award for English Fiction. We met in Ottawa to talk about it.
Nov 30, 2012•31 min
Well known Canadian author/biographer Charlie Foran , playing the Literary Tourist, travelled to Wingham, Ontario and environs to spend a little time in Alice Munro country. I talked to him recently about his experience. Photo credits: © James Lahey 2010
Nov 11, 2012•10 min
I met with Stephanie Hlywak, Media Director at the Poetry Foundation, one hundred years after Poetry magazine was launched in Chicago to the month. We talk about the history, mandate, approach and architecture, not only of the magazine, but also of The Foundation and its impressive building , and, as if this weren't enough, the place and places of poetry itself in our world....
Nov 05, 2012•36 min
