The Cary Collection is one of America’s premier libraries on graphic communication, its history and practices. Located in Rochester on the campus of the Rochester Institute of Technology, the original collection of 2,300 volumes was assembled by New York City businessman Melbert B. Cary, Jr. during the 1920s and 1930s. Cary was director of the Continental Type Founders Association (a type-importing agency), a former president of the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA), and proprietor of th...
Jan 16, 2012•17 min
Last summer I met with Stan Bevington in Toronto to talk about the history of the Coach House Press and some of the more collectible books that it has published over the years. In this, Part ll of our conversation, we discuss, among many other things, the influence of the Stinehour Press; the adoption, adaptation, and in some cases invention of new printing; photographic and computer technologies, and the book designs of Glenn Goluska and Gordon Robertson....
Jan 14, 2012•38 min
It didn't win any prizes; no awards; didn't make many, if any, long or short lists; but David Gilmour's The Perfect Order of Things is a great novel. The best I read last year. In fact, I think it's one of the best Canadian novels ever written. Deceptively easy to read, the book's 300-odd pages are not only crowded with elegantly crafted sentences, they collectively capture and convey levels of insight and depths of experience one typically finds only in great Russian novels. Perfect Order leave...
Jan 09, 2012•37 min
From March 23 to April 30, 2006 the Canadian Centre for Architecture hosted an exhibition entitled 125 Kilos of Books . I took in the show and interviewed Serge Belet , Head of Exhibitions at the CCA, about it. From the notes: "Celebrating the designation of Montreal as UNESCO World Book Capital City for 2005-2006, the exhibition presents a selection of printed architectural works dating from the 15th century to the present from the CCA’s collection in order to provoke thought about what seems, ...
Jan 01, 2012•16 min
I met with Phil Hall , whose latest collection of poems, Killdeer , has just won the Canadian Governor General's Literary Award for English Poetry. It's a sensitive, engaging, revealing work that incorporates narrative essay, life philosophy and literary criticism into its stanzas. In sharp contrast to the arrogant, impenetrable and solipsistic, Hall's poetry is humbly presented, accessible, beautiful, pastoral, reflective and at times profound. Listen here as we talk about brown speckled eggs a...
Dec 19, 2011•39 min
Joseph Malaby Dent (30 August 1849 – 9 May 1926) was the British book publisher who gave the world the Everyman's Library series. After a short, unsuccessful career as an apprentice printer he took up bookbinding, and shortly thereafter founded J. M. Dent and Company, in 1888, publishing the works of Lamb, Goldsmith, Austen, Chaucer, and Tennyson among others. Printed in short runs on handmade paper, these books enjoyed some success, but it wasn't until the Temple Shakespeare series, launched in...
Dec 12, 2011•28 min
Glenn Gould was a world renowned classical pianist and an 'eccentric genius'— a 'solitary, headstrong, hypochondriac virtuoso.' Abandoning stage performances in 1964, he concentrated instead on mastering recordings, radio, television, and print. His sudden death at age fifty stunned the world, but his music and legacy continues. Philosopher/critic Mark Kingwell sees Gould as a philosopher of music whose contradictory, mischievous, and deliberately provocative ideas ruled his life. Instead of a s...
Dec 07, 2011•41 min
Douglas Gibson was, for more than 40 years, a noted Canadian editor and publisher whose skills both as writer and salesman put him at the pinnacle of his profession. Douglas Gibson Books, the first editorial imprint of its kind in Canada, has over the years published much of the best writing that has ever come out of this country. Stories About Storytellers is Gibson's memoir. In a series of short profiles, he tells us tales about some of the authors he has worked with during an illustrious care...
Dec 01, 2011•47 min
Lester "Mike" Pearson was an extraordinary politician. He was also an extraordinary athlete, diplomat, leader, teacher, writer and student. And yet, despite all of this, and, the fact that during his lifetime he was the world's best known Canadian, many are today unaware of the important role he played in creating modern Canada with its enviable social programs and economic safeguards. Andrew Cohen's biography of Pearson , part of Penguin's Extraordinary Canadians series, sets out to rectify thi...
Nov 06, 2011•39 min
A complicated, fascinating, largely unknown man who did a great deal for American literary publishing, Mitchell Kennerley was born in 1878 in Burslem, England. He arrived in the United States in 1896 to help set up publisher John Lane's U.S. offices. After an unhappy parting, Kennerley set off to publish various small literary magazines, and in 1906 launched his own imprint under which he published literary criticism, modern drama, fiction, and poetry, including Modern Love, first book off the p...
Nov 02, 2011•29 min
Founded in Minnesota in 1980 by Emilie Buchwald and R.W. Scholes, M ilkweed Editions is one of America's leading independent, nonprofit literary publishers, releasing between fifteen and twenty new books each year in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and children's literature. Much of its nonfiction is addresses critical environmental issues and works to expand ecological consciousness. Milkweed’s authors come from Minnesota and around the world. Today more than one million Milkweed books are in circ...
Oct 30, 2011•34 min
Hard not to like Randy Bachman. He's smart, friendly, interested, passionate...and a collector. Why a collector? Because in 1976 his favourite guitar was stolen from a Toronto hotel room, and he wanted to get it back. What? A late-1950s orange Gretsch guitar, the Chet Atkins model.Bachman used it -- "my first real professional guitar" -- on the Guess Who hit Shakin' All Over, and later for Bachman-Turner Overdrive's Takin' Care of Business. He has yet to find it. Not all was lost however. Thirty...
Oct 20, 2011•24 min
Coffee House started out as the Toothpaste Press in Iowa in the early 1970s. Founded by Allan Kornblum after taking a University of Iowa typography course with the famed printer Harry Duncan, this small publishing house dedicated itself to producing poetry pamphlets and letterpress books. After 10 years, Kornblum closed the press, moved to Minneapolis, reopened it as a nonprofit organization, and began publishing trade books. In the early 1990s, books such as Donald Duk by Frank Chin and Through...
Oct 11, 2011•51 min
In 1965, Stan Bevington, moved to Toronto from Edmonton, rented an old coach house, installed an antique Challenge Gordon platen press and set up Coach House Press . Over the years his small publishing house introduced the world to the early works of bpNichol, Michael Ondaatje, Margaret Atwood, George Bowering, Frank Davey, Ann-Marie MacDonald, Anne Michaels and many other important Canadian writers. Known for its experimental production techniques and innovative designs, Coach House has publish...
Sep 28, 2011•31 min
George Walker is a wood engraver, book artist, author, illustrator and educator who has taught courses at the Ontario College of Art & Design since 1985. For over twenty years he has exhibited his wood engravings and limited edition books internationally. Among many book projects, George has illustrated two hand-printed editions written by Neil Gaiman. He is the author of The Inverted Line (2000 Porcupine's Quill), Images From the Neocerebellum (Porcupine's Quill 2007), The Woodcut Artist's ...
Sep 18, 2011•23 min
Johanna Skibsrud's debut novel The Sentimentalists won the 2010 Scotiabank Giller Prize and the 2009 Alcuin Award for best designed work of prose fiction, the first book ever to achieve this double win. The Sentimentalists was first published by Gaspereau Press , a highly regarded small press based in Kentiville Nova Scotia, in a print run of 800 copies. The firm had difficulty filling demand for the book after it won the Giller. Chapters-Indigo, Canada's dominant bookstore chain, claimed not to...
Sep 12, 2011•20 min
Etgar Keret is an Israeli writer known for his short stories, graphic novels, and scriptwriting for film and television. His first work, a collection of short stories, was largely ignored when it was published in 1992. His second book, Missing Kissinger , a collection of fifty very short stories, was a hit. The story "Siren", which deals with paradoxes in modern Israeli society, is included in the curriculum for the Israeli matriculation exam in literature. Keret has co-authored several comic bo...
Sep 08, 2011•28 min
Whilst in Texas recently I did what all crazed literary tourists do, I checked around for listings of interesting conferences that were taking place at the time, in the area. The Popular Culture Association was holding one in San Antonio, and this is where I caught up with Cheryl Torsney, (at the time Dean of Hiram College, now Interim Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs at the State University of New York at New Paltz), who was delivering a paper called Collecting as Pedagogy. We ta...
Jul 29, 2011•10 min
James Keeline liked to take apart radios as a young boy. He was also interested in space technology and computers. While in school he worked for a used bookstore. He ended up managing the place and running its web site and computer network. He also started researching and writing about children's series books. His particular interest and expertise is the Stratemeyer Syndicate and its founder Edward Stratemeyer . I met James recently in San Antonio to talk about collecting the Tom Swift series of...
Jul 27, 2011•25 min
Whilst in the Lone Star state, Texas, I had the opportunity to meet and talk with Kathy Doyle Thomas , Executive Vice President at Half Price Books' headquarters in Dallas. The company has been in business now for almost 50 years and has enjoyed considerable success, some say at the expense of independent used bookstores. I met with Doyle, who, incidentally serves as Chairman of the Retail Advertising Marketing Association (RAMA), a division of the National Retail Federation, to talk about this ...
Jul 18, 2011•35 min
The Harry Ransom Center holds the Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. archive, which includes books published under the Borzoi imprint and books from Alfred A. and Blanche Knopf’s personal library. The Ransom Center’s Associate Director for Exhibitions and Fleur Cowles Executive Curator Cathy Henderson, and Associate Director and Hobby Foundation Librarian, Richard Oram, collaborated on The House of Knopf , a book that contains collected documents from the Knopf, Inc. archive and is part of the Dictionary of ...
Jul 11, 2011•38 min
Charles Lohrmann is the editor of Texas Highways , the official travel magazine of Texas. It "encourages recreational travel within Texas and tells the Texas story to readers around the world. Renowned for its photography, statewide events coverage, top weekend excursions, off-the-beaten path discoveries, and scenic destinations, Texas Highways helps readers discover the treasures of the Lone Star State." I met with Charles in Austin and asked him for his top ten literary destinations in Texas. ...
Jun 26, 2011•13 min
This from the Loyalist Research Network website: GEORGE L. PARKER was born in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, and schooled in Lunenburg and Yarmouth, Nova Scotia. He attended Mount Allison University and Pennsylvania State University, and received his Ph. D. from the University of Toronto. He is Professor Emeritus of the Royal Military College of Canada, Kingston, Ontario, where he taught from 1967 to 1997. He lives in Halifax. Professor Parker has contributed articles on Canadian authors a...
Jun 20, 2011•47 min
Gaspereau Press was established in February 1997 as a registered partnership by Andrew Steeves and Gary Dunfield. That year the Press published the first issue of its literary quarterly, The Gaspereau Review, and three trade titles. In 2000, Gaspereau relocated to Kentville, Nova Scotia, where a printing press and bindery equipment were installed enabling the firm to produce its own books. By 2004 the Press had nine full-time employees and was publishing ten titles annually. Gaspereau's core phi...
Jun 10, 2011•43 min
From his website: " Charlie Foran was born and raised in Toronto. He holds degrees from the University of Toronto and the University College, Dublin, and has taught in China, Hong Kong, and Canada. He has published ten books, including four novels [and a biography of Mordecai Richler Mordecai: The Life & Times ], and writes regularly for magazines and newspapers in Canada and elsewhere...Charlie has also made radio documentaries for the CBC program Ideas and recently co-wrote the TV document...
Jun 09, 2011•32 min
Alex Ross was born in 1968 and has been the music critic at The New Yorker magazine since 1996. He graduated from Harvard University in English summa cum laude for a thesis on James Joyce, and was a DJ at college radio station, WHRB. His first book, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century , a cultural history of music since 1900 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007) was a National Book Critics Circle Award winner, and made the New York Times list of top ten best books of 2007. He has r...
May 28, 2011•42 min
Professor, poet, editor and critic, Michael Gnarowski was born in Shanghai, China in 1934. He received his Ph.D. in English literature from the University of Ottawa in 1967. While an undergraduate at McGill, he contributed to, and co-edited, Yes (1956-1970) magazine. He also wrote for and/or edited Le Chien d'or/The Golden Dog (1970-1972), Delta , Golden Dog Press (1971-1985), and Tecumseh Press , and was series editor for McGraw-Hill Ryerson's Critical Views on Canadian Writers Series (1969-197...
May 19, 2011•40 min
Vincent Lam is a Canadian-born member of the expatriate Chinese community of Vietnam. He is an emergency physician in Toronto, and lectures at the University of Toronto. He has also worked in international air evacuation and expedition medicine in the Arctic and Antarctic. His first book, Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures , won the 2006 Scotiabank Giller Prize. We met in Ottawa, during a federal election, to talk about his biography of Tommy Douglas , part of Penguin Canada's Extraordinary Canad...
May 09, 2011•36 min
Locks' Press, according to the Canadian Bookbinders and Book Artists Guild's Ottawa Chapter website, "was founded in 1979. Since then it has printed eleven books, fifteen pamphlets, and twenty-four broadsides. The editions are small, 30 to 80 copies. The press prints mainly illustrated editions of unusual but enduring texts, ranging from classical Greece to the early twentieth century. Fred is the editor and has provided translations for about a third of the titles (from Greek, Latin, Middle Eng...
Apr 26, 2011•40 min
Olivier Barrot has presented the literary program Un livre, Un Jour (A Book a Day) daily on channels France 3 and TV 5 Monde since 1991. In 2009, the year in which he celebrated his 4,000th program, he created Un Livre Toujours (Always a Book), a weekly program devoted to paperback books. Along with Thierry Taittinger, Olivier is the co-founder of 'Senso'. He has been co-director of the magazine since 2001. He has worked as a journalist for Le Monde, where he has written the “Books” and “Travel”...
Mar 22, 2011•20 min
