Richard Ovenden has been Bodley’s Librarian (the senior executive position of the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford) since 2014. He is a Fellow at the Society of Antiquaries and Royal Society of Arts; a member of the American Philosophical Society; Treasurer, at the Consortium of European Research Libraries; and President of the Digital Preservation Coalition. He was awarded the OBE by The Queen in 2019. And almost as big a deal, he joined me recently on Zoom to talk...
Feb 25, 2021•53 min
Dan Mozersky enjoyed a long and fruitful career in the retail book industry. As a founding member of Indigo Books & Music's executive team he was instrumental in turning the company's vision into reality ( we talk about this in Part ll of our conversation). During the 1990s he served as manager of U.S. Operations for Classic Books in New York. Prior to this he founded and owned a chain of retail bookstores in Ottawa and Montreal. Active in the Canadian Booksellers Association, he served as d...
Feb 20, 2021•1 hr 19 min
Mary Newberry is a Toronto-based freelance editor, indexer, and teacher. Her early passion was dancing. The self-discipline she learned from it is today one of her greatest assets. She works mostly with humanities-related texts: academic, government, literary, creative arts and general interest, and lately, in memoir. She has a long-term relationship with social justice and diversity, and enjoys working in these areas. Scholarly editing is one of her specialties. She enjoys complex materials, he...
Feb 13, 2021•1 hr 1 min
The son of prominent book collector Kenneth E. Hill, Jonathan A. Hill grew up in a house filled with old books. After graduating from university in 1974 he served a classic apprenticeship, working for four leading antiquarian booksellers in San Francisco, New York, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles. In 1978 he started his own company and has specialized in science, medicine, natural history, bibliography and the history of book collecting, and early printed books. For the past 20 years he has, partn...
Jan 27, 2021•46 min
Miriam Borden , a teacher of Yiddish and PhD Candidate at the University of Toronto, is winner of the 2020 Honey and Wax Book Collecting Prize for “Building a Nation of Little Readers: Twentieth-Century Yiddish Primers and Workbooks for Children.” Borden collects twentieth-century Yiddish educational materials. Language primers form the core of her collection which also includes songbooks and workbooks, flash cards, and scripts from school plays. These artifacts testify to a once-thriving Yiddis...
Jan 24, 2021•51 min
Martin Latham has been a bookseller for thirty-five years. He has a PhD in Indian history, and taught at Hertfordshire University before turning to bookselling. He is proud to be responsible for the biggest petty-cash claim in Waterstones' history, when he paid for the excavation of a Roman bath-house floor under his bookshop. Martin's books include Kent's Strangest Tales, Londonopolis , and most recently The Bookseller's Tale which we talk about in this episode. It's really a book full of tales...
Jan 17, 2021•1 hr 8 min
The Bookshelf bookshop in Guelph, Ontario was established in 1973 by Barb and Doug Minett . In 1980 it became The Bookshelf Cafe - Canada's first bookstore cafe/restaurant. Shortly thereafter an ambitious plan was conceived to add a cinema and bar to what was then the roof of the building. During implementation, University of Guelph physics professor and longtime customer, Jim Hunt, trained a team of 10 cafe servers and booksellers in the art & science of 35mm projection. In 1988 The Bookshe...
Jan 13, 2021•1 hr 15 min
It was on Twitter a couple of months ago that I noticed this tweet celebrating the work of one Bianca Gillam (@BinxGillam). 'You're the best special sales assistant ever', it said, or words to that effect. Hmm I thought. What, I wonder, does a special sales assistant do at a publishing house - I'd noticed that she worked at Simon & Schuster ( @simonschusterUK ). I wasn't sure. So I tweeted at Bianca, inviting her to appear on the podcast to explain just exactly what she does....
Jan 04, 2021•57 min
Last year at about this time David Gilmour and I sat down together to talk about " Mojave " one of Truman Capote's greatest short stories. We enjoyed ourselves so much we decided to do it again, this time with " Shut a Final Door ." Capote wrote this story when he was only 23 years old. David contends that it strongly foreshadows how Truman's actual life would unfold - as a slow, messy descent into hell. Perfect fare for the holiday season. Merry Christmas everyone. Thanks for listening! Photo b...
Dec 25, 2020•1 hr
Virago is a London-based British publishing company committed to publishing women's writing and books on "feminist" topics. Established by women in the 1970s in tandem with the Women's Liberation Movement (WLM), Virago has done much to address inequitable gender dynamics in the publishing world, and, unlike anti-capitalist publishing ventures, has branded itself a commercial alternative in a male dominated publishing industry, seeking to compete with mainstream international presses. Initially k...
Dec 21, 2020•59 min
Martin Amis was born in Oxford in 1949 and is a British novelist, essayist, and memoirist - all of whom show up to contribute to his latest novel, Inside Story. As it happens I read Lolita in tandem with Inside Story , so the front-end of our conversation is laden with nasty Nabokovian-related questions. Since Vladimir, along with Saul Bellow, has heavily influenced Martin's writing over the years, I decided this was fair game. Amis is best known for his novels Money (1984) and London Fields (19...
Dec 13, 2020•49 min
" Martin Parr 's celebrated photographs bridge the divide between art and documentary photography. His studies of the idiosyncrasies of mass culture and consumerism around the world, his innovative imagery, and his prolific output have placed him firmly at the forefront of contemporary art. He is an avid collector and maker of photobooks. His own photobooks include The Last Resort (1986), Common Sense (iggg) and Boring Postcards (Phaidon Press, 1999), and he is the subject of the monograph Marti...
Nov 30, 2020•56 min
...in which I posit that raising funds is a primary motivator explaining why scientists write, and Lawrence disagrees; and the two of us argue over the similarities and differences between art and science... The combatants tend to confuse human-made with nature-made art, and possibly don't even actually disagree, if we're talking big picture. Anyway, the conversation is lively, if nothing else. Throughout the episode we reference Lawrence's entertaining, readable book The Greatest Story Ever Tol...
Nov 22, 2020•38 min
Patrick McGahern has been operating an antiquarian bookshop in Ottawa, Canada's capital, since 1969. Today it continues to thrive under the management of Patrick's son Liam. The store specializes in Used and Rare Books, Canadiana, Americana, Arctic, Antarctic, Travel, Natural History & Voyages, Illustrated & Plate Books, Rare Books, Irish and Scottish History and Literature. I met Patrick via Zoom to celebrate his 51 years in business, to try to learn some of what he's learned over the y...
Nov 15, 2020•1 hr 9 min
Roger Chartier was born in 1945 in Lyon, France. He is a giant in the field of book history and the study of publishing and reading. He teaches at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, the Collège de France, and the University of Pennsylvania. I interviewed Roger via Zoom in hopes of determining exactly why he's a giant, who's shoulders he stands on, and what he has contributed to the study of book history. Among other things we talk about Roger's book of essays ...
Nov 11, 2020•1 hr 23 min
Toby Faber grew up with Faber & Faber - its books and stories have played an important role in his life. He was the company's managing director for four years and remains a non-executive director and chairman of sister company Faber Music. He has written two celebrated works of non-fiction, Stradivarius and Fabergé 's Eggs . His first novel, Close to the Edge , was published by Muswell Press in 2019. He lives in London with his wife and two daughters. We met via Zoom to talk about his book F...
Nov 05, 2020•1 hr 6 min
Powell's Books is a chain of bookstores located in and around Portland, Oregon. It claims to be the largest independent new and used bookstore in the world. Powell's 'City of Books' store is located on the edge of downtown and occupies a full city block. It covers some 68,000 square feet or 1.6 acres of retail floor space. Emily Powell is a third generation owner of the bookstore. She made headlines this past August for dumping Amazon as a sales partner. To mark "Independent Bookstore Day" she a...
Oct 26, 2020•56 min
Tiphaine Guillermou is an editor with Graphéine , a design agency with offices in Paris and Lyon. While researching 20th century French book design - so that I'd have some books to hunt down while visiting bookstores in France - I came across a terrific article Tiphaine had written for Graphéine 's blog, here . It was exactly what I was looking for - filled with all sorts of great book collecting leads. I was so impressed with the article I decided to interview Tiphaine about it. Listen as we ta...
Oct 20, 2020•58 min
Andy Hunter is the founder and CEO of Bookshop.org He's also the publisher at Catapult , at Counterpoint and at Softskull , and, as if this isn't enough, publisher and co-creator at LitHub , and co-founder and chairman at Electric Literature . Despite all of these responsibilities, Andy took the time to talk via Zoom about his latest venture and how to use it to help support indie bookstores, and, at the same time, stick it to Amazon. Bookshop.org is "an online book marketplace designed to suppo...
Oct 11, 2020•53 min
Benoit Forgeot is one of France's leading antiquarian book dealers. We met in his office, in the Odeon district of Paris to talk about what differentiates French collectors from American; French book binders; secrets; coffee; the manuscript market ( good time to buy); Paul Bonet , coffee again; business in Paris versus the provinces; the crucial knowledge that American curators impart, and much more, (includes Parisian street sounds)....
Oct 05, 2020•1 hr
Anne-Solange Noble has been International Rights Manager at Gallimard since 1992. She was born and raised in Montreal, Canada and graduated from McGill University in Hispanic Literature. After spending two years in Mexico she went to Paris where she studied International Relations at the Institut d’Études Politiques de Paris. In 1985 she landed a job in rights negotiations with Flammarion. Seven years later she moved to Gallimard to do the same thing, and has been there ever since. Recently her ...
Sep 27, 2020•1 hr 6 min
Lifted from Bill Samuel 's website : Itinerant one-time chartered accountant who has lived in Denmark, East Africa, the Gulf (Arabian/Persian, not Texan) and the Caribbean with shorter stints in Eastern Europe and various rather nice small islands. Born in England into a family with an international outlook, an interest in people and a feeling for the cultural side of life. William Foyle, one of the greatest booksellers, and book collectors, of the twentieth century was his grandfather. Bill inh...
Sep 22, 2020•1 hr 14 min
John Freeman is an American writer and a literary critic. He was the editor of Granta from 2009 to 2013, and is a former president of the National Book Critics Circle . His writing has appeared in more than 200 English-language publications around the world and he currently edits a series of anthologies of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry entitled Freeman's, published in partnership with Grove/Atlantic and The New School. Reason enough, I figured, to want to talk to him about the role of the edit...
Sep 13, 2020•1 hr 19 min
Kenneth White is the founder of Sutherland House Books . He is the former editor-in-chief of Saturday Night Magazine , the founding editor of The National Post , and the former editor and publisher of Maclean’s magazine. He was president of Rogers Publishing, Canada’s largest magazine company, and the founding president of Next Issue Canada (now Texture), in partnership with Conde Nast, Meredith, Hearst, and Time Inc. Mr. Whyte is the author of The Uncrowned King: The Sensational Rise of William...
Sep 06, 2020•56 min
Jael Richardson is the author of The Stone Thrower: A Daughter’s Lesson, a Father’s Life , a memoir exploring her relationship with her father, CFL quarterback Chuck Ealey. It was adapted into a children’s book in 2016. Richardson is a book columnist and guest host on CBC’s q . She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph and lives in Brampton, Ontario where she founded and serves as the Artistic Director for the Festival of Literary Diversity (FOLD). Her debut novel, Gutte...
Aug 29, 2020•1 hr 19 min
Pierre Assouline is a French writer and journalist. He was born in Casablanca, Morocco and has published several novels. He has written biographies of, among others, the legendary photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson; Hergé, the creator of The Adventures of Tintin ; Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, the art dealer, and Georges Simenon, the detective novelist and creator of Inspector Maigret. As a journalist, Assouline has worked for some of France's leading publications, including Lire and Le Nouvel Observ...
Aug 23, 2020•47 min
After graduating from university in 2005 Maylis Besserie began teaching documentary production at the Institute of Communications and Media in Paris, and joined France Culture as a radio producer and host. In February 2020 she published her first novel, Le Tiers Temps ( Gallimard ) . It evokes the last days of Samuel Beckett in a Parisian retirement home. The protagonist, while describing his responses to daily life in the home, also experiences a dream-like reality as he tries to recall the peo...
Aug 15, 2020•42 min
'Barnet Lee "Barney" Rosset, Jr. (1922 – 2012) was owner of the Grove Press publishing house and publisher and editor-in-chief at the Evergreen Review . He led a successful legal battle to publish the uncensored version of D. H. Lawrence's novel Lady Chatterley's Lover , and later was the American publisher of Henry Miller's controversial novel Tropic of Cancer . The right to publish and distribute Miller's novel in the United States was affirmed by the Supreme Court of the United States in 1964...
Aug 10, 2020•57 min
Jacques Shore is a partner in Gowling WLG's Ottawa office, a member of the firm's Advocacy Group, and past leader of the firm's Government Affairs Group. He has acted as lead negotiator on many business and government-related initiatives and has worked actively on behalf of the federal government of Canada and provincial governments on a broad range of legal and public policy matters, including cultural policy. Actively involved in the community, Jacques is a past chair of Carleton University'...
Aug 02, 2020•56 min
Richard Nash is a coach, strategist, and serial entrepreneur. He led partnerships and content at the culture discovery start-up Small Demons and the new media app Byliner. Previously he ran independent publishers Soft Skull (not Skill) Press and Red Lemonade where he published Maggie Nelson, Lynne Tillman, Vanessa Veselka’s Zazen , Alain Mabanckou, and many others, for which work he was awarded the Association of American Publishers’ Award for Creativity in Independent Publishing in 2005. In 201...
Jul 27, 2020•41 min
