I met with famed Czech writer/novelist Ivan Klima at his home in Prague to talk about his memoir My Crazy Century . Topics covered include the criminal conspiracy of communism, the impact on his life of the Terazin concentration camp, the thrill of freedom, forests, poisonous mushrooms, communist stupidity and lack of common sense, Potemkin villages, political apathy, great literature describing complications in human relationships, fiction as invention not real life, socialism's lack of product...
Mar 06, 2018•53 min
Guy Baxter has been University Archivist at University of Reading since 2008. His responsibilities include caring for the Archive of British Publishing and Printing , the archives of the Museum of English Rural Life, and the Beckett Collection. Guy has worked in museum archives for over 15 years and has advised on several major research projects including Staging Beckett (AHRC), Giving Voice to the Nation (AHRC) and the East London Theatre Archive/ CEDAR (JISC). He is a Trustee of the Beckett In...
Mar 01, 2018•50 min
Historian John Cole started working at the Library of Congress as a young man in 1966. Most of his books since have dealt with this venerable institution. We talk here about it's influence on American political and cultural life, about Thomas Jefferson as bibliophile, about books comprising a small part of the library's total collection; capturing, cataloging and digitizing the world's intellectual activity, serving the blind, teaching teachers how to use the collection on-line, subjective colle...
Feb 16, 2018•30 min
Stephan Delbos is a New England-born writer living in Prague, where he teaches at Anglo-American University and Charles University. His poetry, essays and translations have appeared internationally in journals such as Absinthe, Agni, Oxonian Review, PEN America, and Zoland Poetry. He is the editor of From a Terrace in Prague: A Prague Poetry Anthology (Litteraria Pragensia, 2011). A collection of visual, music-inspired poems, “Bagatelles for Typewriter,” was exhibited at Prague’s ArtSpace Galler...
Feb 16, 2018•51 min
Series: Biblio File in France Better known for its wines, the perfection of its local spoken French, it's cathedral and chateau, the city of Tours France also has a surprisingly rich historical connection with printing and typography. I was in Tours recently and visited the Musee de la Typographie . It may be small, but it's full of all sorts of different kinds of old printing equipment and tools, typefaces, woodcuts and handmade paper. As one visitor put it: "Muriel Méchin, the owner takes you ...
Feb 12, 2018•24 min
I interviewed Lauren Elkin about her new book Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London at her apartment in the Belleville neighbourhood of Paris. Stepping off a rather ordinary, noisy street through a large pair of solid French (!) doors, I encountered a lovely, quiet, tree-lined pathway/courtyard en route to "an airy, comfortable writer's home, filled with books, art, plants, and even a piano." To start with, Elkin suggests that the flâneur is "the quintessent...
Feb 03, 2018•54 min
Yes, the background voices are distracting, but what do you expect, we're in a Welsh pub for crying out loud! Well, actually we're upstairs at the Dylan Thomas Centr e in Swansea at a bar surrounded by revellers who have just attended a hilarious poetry vs burlesque mashup down the hallway in the Centre's theatre. So everyone is pretty frisky. The performance kicked off the annual Dylan Thomas Festival. Dylan Thomas expert Jo Furber is Swansea Council Literature Officer and curator of the Dylan ...
Feb 02, 2018•17 min
Wikipedia tells us that "Thomas Bewick (1753 – 1828) was an English engraver and author. Early in his career he took on all kinds of work such as engraving , making the wood blocks for advertisements, and illustrating children's books. He gradually turned to illustrating, writing and publishing his own books, gaining an adult audience for the fine illustrations in A History of Quadrupeds . His career began when he was apprenticed to engraver Ralph Beilby in Newcastle upon Tyne. He became a partn...
Feb 01, 2018•19 min
Gaylord Schanilec is an American wood engraver , printer , designer and illustrator. He is the proprietor of Midnight Paper Sales press. Schanilec has "set the standard for contemporary artist’s books over the last 30 years." His highly collected and unique fine press books explore his interests and experiences as well as his hometown Wisconsin landscape and community. From farming culture and the rivers of the Mississippi to an exhaustive inventory of the 24 species of trees surrounding his hom...
Jan 20, 2018•38 min
David Esslemont is an artist, designer, printmaker and bookbinder. He makes books from scratch, most recently about food, and publishes under his Solmentes Press imprint. He was Artistic Director of the University of Wales Gregynog Press from 1985–97 and has won many book design awards including the Felice Feliciano International Award in 1991. Esslemont’s work can be found in both private and public collections worldwide. (His archive to 2005 is held at the University of Iowa.) I braved the har...
Jan 16, 2018•47 min
In which I talk, in rather rushed fashion, to great Canadian author and "bad" feminist Margaret Atwood about literary tourism: 'place' and her novel MaddAddam , Harvard and The Handmaid's Tale , and the Kingston Penitentiary and Alias Grace , also the real and the imaginary, the unreliability of eye witnesses, following the research, Samuel Johnson, Ernest Hemingway, food and underclothing, bodies, space and smell, plus the importance of plumbing.
Jan 15, 2018•15 min
November 30, 2017 marked the 350th anniversary of the birth of one the world's great satirists, Jonathan Swift. To honour the occasion I thought it would be fitting to interview an expert on humour, in this, the age of Trump. So I met recently with Maggie Hennefeld, Assistant Professor of Cultural Studies & Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota, in Minneapolis. We discuss her article Laughter in the Age of Trump that appeared in Flow an online journal of television and media ...
Dec 04, 2017•47 min
Scott Griffin, (born 1938) is a Canadian businessman and philanthropist best known for founding the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2000, one of the world's most generous poetry awards, and 'Poetry In Voice', a bilingual recitation competition for Canadian high schools. Griffin is chairman, director and majority shareholder since 2002 of House of Anansi Press/Groundwood Books, and Chancellor of Bishop's University. In 2006, Griffin published a memoir entitled My Heart Is Africa that recounted his two-ye...
Nov 16, 2017•32 min
I met with publisher Simon Dardick at his home office in Montreal to talk about the history and collecting of his long-running literary publishing house Vehicule Press .
Apr 28, 2015•46 min
Glenn Dixon has published two books. Pi lgrim in the Palace of Words : A journey through the 6000 languages of Earth was published in 2009 to rave reviews. His second, Tripping the World Fantastic: A journey through the music of our planet came out in April of 2013. He has also published travel articles and cultural pieces in major publications such as National Geographic Magazine, the New York Post, the Walrus Magazine, the Globe and Mail and even Psychology Today. Glenn has traveled through se...
Oct 21, 2014•19 min
Marcello Di Cintio is a Canadian writer. He won the 2012 Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing for his book Walls: Travels Along the Barricades. The award was handed out on March 6, 2013 at the Writers' Trust of Canada's annual Politics and the Pen in Ottawa. Marcello was born in Calgary, Alberta where he currently lives with his wife, Moonira, and son, Amedeo. We met recently to discuss his literary pilgrimage to Iran, which he wrote about in his book, Poets and Pahlevans , a Journey in...
Sep 17, 2014•12 min
Rae Armantrout is an American poet generally associated with Language Poets. Armantrout was born in Vallejo, California but grew up in San Diego. She has published more than 10 books of poetry and has also been featured in a number of major anthologies. Armantrout teaches at the University of California, San Diego, where she is Professor of Poetry and Poetics. Armantrout was awarded the 2009 National Book Critics Circle Award for her collection of poetry Versed, published by the Wesleyan Univers...
Sep 17, 2014•24 min
The Press & Letterfoundry of Michael & Winifred Bixler is "devoted to the craft of fine letterpress printing and traditional book typography. Our extensive collection of English Monotype matrices allows us to cast from 8- to 72-point, classic book typefaces including Bembo, Dante, Walbaum, Van Dijck, Joanna, Perpetua, Garamond, Centaur & Arrighi, Ehrhardt, Fournier, Bell, Baskerville, Poliphilus, Plantin, Gill Sans, & Univers. Work is designed, set, printed, & bound in our sh...
Jul 15, 2014•1 hr 3 min
I met with David Mason in Kingston to talk about his memoir The Pope's Bookbinder . As the Biblioasis website wordsmiths have it: "From his drug-hazy, book-happy years near the Beat Hotel in Paris and throughout his career as antiquarian book dealer, David Mason brings us a storied life. He discovers his love of literature in a bathtub at age eleven, thumbing through stacks of lurid Signet paperbacks. At fifteen he’s expelled from school. For the next decade and a half, he will work odd jobs, bu...
Jul 11, 2014•36 min
Matthew Tree (born December 30, 1958) is a writer in English and Catalan. He has lived in Barcelona since 1984. Apart from publishing both fiction and non-fiction, he is a contributor to various newspapers and magazines such as Catalonia Today, The Times Literary Supplement , Barcelona INK, Altaïr , El Punt Avui and L'Esguard. He has also appeared on various Catalan language radio and TV stations and is current a monthly guest on Catalunya Ràdio's chat show L'Oracle. In 2005 and 2006 he scripted...
Jul 09, 2014•27 min
George Tremlett (born 1939) is an English author, bookshop owner, and former politician. According to his own biography, after leaving King Edward VI School Stratford-upon-Avon, he worked for the Coventry Evening Telegraph from 1957 onward as a TV columnist and pop music reviewer. In 1961 he became a freelance rock journalist and in the 1970s wrote a series of paperbacks on pop stars, including The David Bowie Story , the first bio of the musician. He is a biographer of Dylan Thomas and his wife...
Jul 08, 2014•57 min
Wales celebrated the centenary of famed Welsh poet Dylan Thomas in 2014 . Annie Haden is an experienced tourist guide and a specialist in the life of Thomas. With over 20 years experience in the tourism sector, Anne uses an easy listening story-telling technique which keeps her tours both interesting and informative. I caught up with her at Morgans hotel in Swansea, Thomas's home town, to talk about poet and place....
Jul 07, 2014•39 min
I met with Andre Alexis to discuss his novella, A (BookThug, 2013). During our conversation we hit, among other things, on literary criticism, book reviewing, 'Good' and 'Baddeley' literary critics, and David Gilmour and his GG Award winning novel A Perfect Night to go to China , and Alexis's contention that racism is contained in the chapter in this novel entitled “The Pigeon”. Please note that, as a condition of making the recording of this conversation public, Alexis's essay entitled “Of a Sm...
Jun 06, 2014•48 min
Alberto Manguel is an Argentine-born writer, translator, and editor, and the author of many books of both non-fiction, including A History of Reading (1996), The Library at Night (2007) and Homer's Iliad and Odyssey: A Biography (2008); and fiction ( News From a Foreign Country Came , 1991). We met at the Kingston WritersFest; I asked him to recount some of his favourite experiences in bookstores and libraries around the world. First he pointed out that libraries and bookstores, in spite of thei...
Dec 06, 2013•12 min
Herman Melville lived at Arrowhead (so named because of arrowheads found nearby during planting season) from 1850–1863, during which time he wrote some of his best known works: Moby-Dick, The Confidence-Man, and The Piazza Tales, a short story collection named after his porch, of which he wrote: Now, for a house, so situated in such a country, to have no piazza for the convenience of those who might desire to feast upon the view, and take their time and ease about it, seemed as much of an omissi...
Nov 04, 2013•16 min
The Mount is a historic site and a cultural center inspired by the passions and achievements of Edith Wharton. Designed and built by Wharton in 1902, the house embodies the principles outlined in her influential book, The Decoration of Houses (1897). The property includes three acres of formal gardens designed by Wharton, who was also an authority on European landscape design, surrounded by extensive woodlands. Programming at The Mount reflects Wharton’s core interests in the literary arts, inte...
Oct 25, 2013•22 min
From 1959-1964, McClelland and Stewart published a run of poetry books written by Irving Layton, designed by Frank Newfeld, edited by Claire Pratt, and often illustrated with photographs by Sam Tata. They turned out to be among Layton’s most famous and influential titles ( A Red Carpet for the Sun [1959], The Swinging Flesh [1961], Balls for a One-Armed Juggler [1963], and The Laughing Rooster [1964]). Cameron Anstee , proprietor of Apt 9 Press and a PhD student in the English Department at the ...
Oct 23, 2013•38 min
This from the Yale University Library website: "William Reese '77 is an antiquarian bookseller living in New Haven, CT. His firm, William Reese Company, founded in 1975 when he was a sophomore, is one of the leading rare book dealers in the world, specializing in Americana, travels and voyages, and literature. He has been active with the Yale Library for many years, funding a number of fellowships in the Beinecke Library. Bill served on the committee to raise funds for the Irving S. Gilmore Musi...
Oct 14, 2013•55 min
Shanty Bay Press was established in Shanty Bay, Ontario, in 1996 as a private press devoted to publishing livres d’artistes in which the texts and the illustrations accompanying them would have equal weight in the design of the books. The press is a partnership: the type-setting, presswork and binding are the work of Janis Butler, the illustrations are by Walter Bachinski, and the editorial, design and publishing decisions are shared. The press’s equipment includes a Vandercook SP20, Vandercook ...
Oct 10, 2013•1 hr 2 min
I attended the Kingston WritersFest and interviewed some great authors about 'place' and its relationship to their work. Here I talk with Thomas King about native myth, possibility in storytelling, his love of the Alberta Landscape - especially that which surrounds Lethbridge - and those novels of his which best capture the essence of this spectacular place.
Oct 05, 2013•11 min
