David Frum is a senior editor at T he 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 ...
Jul 20, 2020•48 min
Peter Florence is a British festival director, notable for founding the Hay Festival with his parents, Norman and Rhoda Florence. FYI the 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 fe...
Jul 16, 2020•58 min
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, Radis...
Jul 13, 2020•1 hr 11 min
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...
Jul 06, 2020•1 hr 12 min
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 intervie...
Jun 29, 2020•1 hr 33 min
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 Br...
Jun 24, 2020•1 hr 15 min
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 t...
Jun 16, 2020•48 min
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 Universi...
Jun 15, 2020•47 min
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, ...
Jun 12, 2020•36 min
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, ne...
Jun 07, 2020•1 hr 8 min
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...
Jun 01, 2020•1 hr 24 min
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 (gre...
May 24, 2020•47 min
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...
May 21, 2020•45 min
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...
May 18, 2020•50 min
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 biogr...
May 11, 2020•1 hr 9 min
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 Kan...
May 06, 2020•51 min
"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 ...
May 04, 2020•50 min
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, ...
Apr 26, 2020•1 hr 3 min
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 UM...
Apr 20, 2020•51 min
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. H...
Apr 13, 2020•53 min
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 Ex...
Apr 06, 2020•52 min
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 d...
Apr 01, 2020•23 min
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 ...
Mar 30, 2020•56 min
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 th...
Mar 25, 2020•29 min
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 Spanis...
Mar 23, 2020•1 hr 1 min
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 twen...
Mar 15, 2020•56 min
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 w...
Mar 08, 2020•37 min
" 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 Li...
Feb 29, 2020•1 hr 9 min
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.” Amo...
Feb 24, 2020•54 min
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 disting...
Feb 17, 2020•39 min
