Canada has an impressive tradition of producing great printer- publishers. Three of our best are Stan Bevington, Tim Inkster, and Andrew Steeves . Ancient interviews with all three can be found here on The Biblio File website. The one with Andrew took place a dozen years ago so I figured it was time to clock another. I drove down to Kentville, Nova Scotia last month, where Andrew lives and works, and sat down with him again right next to the place where the wall cordoning off his office used to ...
Oct 05, 2021•1 hr 31 min
Michele K. Troy is professor of English at Hillyer College at the University of Hartford. She studies Anglo-American literary modernism in continental Europe and is the author of Strange Bird: The Albatross Press and the Third Reich , the first book to be written about the Albatross Press, a Penguin precursor, that entered into an uneasy relationship with the Nazi regime to keep Anglo-American literature alive under fascism. The press was, from its beginnings in 1932, a “strange bird”: a cultura...
Sep 27, 2021•1 hr 16 min
Since 1972, Dr. Steven Lomazow has been building a collection of important American periodicals; it's now considered to be the most extensive in private hands. "The Steven Lomazow Collection of American Periodicals has been curated for the purpose of demonstrating the role of magazines as a reflection of all aspects American popular culture from pre-revolutionary times to the present day." Highlights of the collection were featured in an exhibition at The Grolier Club in New York this Spring cal...
Sep 21, 2021•1 hr 4 min
On this episode of The Biblio File Book Club Heather O'Neill and I discuss one of her favourite novels, Agota Kristof's The Notebook . This dark, fractured fairy tale of a story, told in simple, striking, visual language, describes the devastating impact of war on children and their families. Set in an unknown country during wartime it follows the lives of twin boys coping with life after they've been left by their mother to live with their dirty old grandmother. A dangerous weirdness ensues. We...
Sep 13, 2021•1 hr
Aimee Peake has been active in the antiquarian book business in Winnipeg for more than 20 years. She got her start as an apprentice to Michael Park, proprietor Greenfield Books. In 2000 she took over as manager of the newly-opened Bison Books, assuming sole proprietorship in 2010. In 2018 she purchased Greenfield and amalgamated it with Bison. You'll usually find Aimee in her bookshop on weekdays attending to customer needs and working on acquisitions, collections development and appraisals. Ove...
Sep 01, 2021•43 min
Jack David launched the publishing house ECW in 1974 as the journal Essays on Canadian Writing - from which came the E, the C, and the W. For the next ten years the company focused on scholarly projects and occasionally dabbled in more accessible trade books and biographies. The breakthrough came when it decided in the early 90s to publish books about non-literary folk, the key title being a biography of country singer k.d. lang. The book broke out in the American market and illustrated to ECW t...
Aug 30, 2021•57 min
Dr. Stephen Enniss is Director of the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin . He has held previous appointments at the Folger Shakespeare Library and at Emory University’s Rare Book Library. His research interests are in 20th century poetry, and he has written on Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, and Seamus Heaney, among others. He is the author of After the Titanic: A Life of Derek Mahon (Gill and Macmillan, 2014). The Harry Ransom Center is one of the great rare book libraries of th...
Aug 27, 2021•39 min
Meghan Constantinou has been Head Librarian at The Grolier Club since 2011 and a Club member since 2013. Her research interests include the history of private collecting, women’s book ownership, and provenance studies. The Club Library collects, preserves, and makes accessible materials dedicated to the history and art of the book. Strengths of its collection include bibliographies, histories of printing and graphic processes, type specimens, fine and historic examples of printing, bookbinding, ...
Aug 16, 2021•51 min
One of the best ways to become a successful, fulfilled antiquarian bookseller is to establish close, long-lasting relationships with enthusiastic, committed, ideally well-heeled, collectors. Justin Schiller is a pioneer in the field of rare, collectible children's books. During his career he has developed extraordinary bonds with many passionate book lovers. His efforts over the years with several of them have resulted in some of the world's best known children's book collections. We talk about ...
Aug 02, 2021•1 hr 2 min
Walter Lockhart Gordon (1906 – 1987) was a Canadian accountant, businessman, politician, and economic nationalist. Born in Toronto, he was educated at Upper Canada College and the Royal Military College of Canada in Kingston, Ontario. Upon graduation he joined the family accounting firm of Clarkson, Gordon and Company. During World War II he served in the Bank of Canada and the federal Ministry of Finance. In 1946, he chaired the Royal Commission on Administrative Classifications in the Public S...
Jul 10, 2021•1 hr 1 min
Don Lindgren established Rabelais Books in 2006. The bookshop now operates out of Biddeford, Maine and specializes in Artists’ Books, Cocktails, Cookbooks, Farm and Garden, Gastronomy, History of Food, Rare Periodicals, and Wine. We met years ago when I sought him out in Portland to talk about collecting cookbooks ( Listen here ). As we parted Don handed me a copy of his first Rabelais catalogue with the big salami on its cover. I've been intrigued with them (bookseller catalogues) ever since. D...
Jul 03, 2021•1 hr 49 min
According to his website, "In 1995, Bruce Batchelor rocked the publishing industry when he invented print-on-demand (POD) publishing and triggered a landslide of new books from every country in the world." Did he invent it? You'll have to listen to the podcast to find out. Since 1995, more than 1,000,000 writers, says Bruce, "have seized the opportunity to be published through services such as Agio (his small publishing consultancy firm), Author Services, Kindle Direct Publishing and many other ...
Jun 22, 2021•1 hr 5 min
" Ursula Nordstrom (1910 - 1988) was publisher and editor-in-chief of juvenile books at Harper & Row from 1940 to 1973. She is credited with presiding over a transformation in children's literature in which morality tales written for adult approval gave way to works that instead appealed to children's imaginations and emotions." She authored the 1960 children's book The Secret Language , and a collection of her correspondence, edited by Leonard Marcus, entitled Dear Genius: the Letters of Ur...
Jun 14, 2021•1 hr 3 min
Marion Sinclair has been Chief Executive of Publishing Scotland since 2008, with responsibility for program management, funding bids, policy, the International Publishing Fellowship program, publishing practice issues and reporting to Creative Scotland. She has worked in the book publishing sector for more than 30 years, at Polygon from 1988-97 (awarded Sunday Times UK Small Publisher of the Year in 1993) then as a university lecturer in publishing, before joining PS in 2003. Marion is also a bo...
Jun 08, 2021•1 hr
Conrad Black - in full, Conrad Moffat Black, Lord Black of Crossharbour - was born in 1944, in Montreal. He is an author, columnist, historian, and businessman who built the third largest newspaper group in the world during the 1980s and 1990s. At its height the organization controlled nearly 250 newspapers including the London Daily Telegraph, the Fairfax Group in Australia, The Jerusalem Post, Southam Press in Canada, and the Chicago Sun-Times. Black studied history and political science at Ca...
May 30, 2021•47 min
John Brookshire Thompson is a British sociologist, a professor at the University of Cambridge, and a fellow of Jesus College. His work over the past two decades has focused particularly on the publishing industry. Books in the Digital Age: The Transformation of Academic and Higher Education Publishing in Britain and the United States (Polity, 2005) presents an analysis of higher education publishing from 1980 to 2005. Much of the analysis is based on industry interviews made on condition of anon...
May 22, 2021•1 hr 28 min
Ruth Panofsky is Professor of English at Ryerson University in Toronto. She is a leading scholar of the history of publishing and authorship in Canada and Canadian Jewish literature, an award-winning poet and a Fellow of the Royal Society. We met via Zoom to discuss her most recent book Toronto Trailblazers: Women in Canadian Publishing (2019, U of T Press) which explores the influence of seven women who helped advance a modern literary culture in Canada. "Publisher Irene Clarke, scholarly edito...
May 18, 2021•1 hr 6 min
Dwight Garner is an American journalist and a longtime writer and editor for the New York Times . In 2008, he was named a book critic for the newspaper. Garner's previous post at The New York Times was as senior editor of The New York Times Book Review , where he worked from 1999 to 2008. He was a founding editor of Salon.com where he worked from 1995 to 1998. Garner now lives, or will shortly live, in New Orleans. He is married to Cree LeFavour, author of the memoir Lights On, Rats Out and seve...
May 10, 2021•1 hr
Mark Samuels Lasner is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Delaware Library, and one of the world's great book collectors. The Mark Samuels Lasner Collection focuses on British literature and art from 1850 to 1900, with an emphasis on the Pre-Raphaelites and writers and illustrators of the 1890s. It comprises more than 9,500 books, letters, manuscripts, photographs, ephemera, and artworks, including many items signed by such figures as Oscar Wilde, George Eliot, Max Beerbohm, William M...
May 03, 2021•1 hr 26 min
David Frum is a Canadian-American political commentator and a senior editor at The Atlantic. He is the author of ten books, most recently TRUMPOCALYPSE: Restoring American Democracy (HarperCollins, 2020). His first book, Dead Right , won praise from William F. Buckley as “the most refreshing intellectual experience in a generation” and from Frank Rich in the New York Times as “the smartest book written from the inside about the American conservative movement.” He is a former speechwriter for Pre...
Apr 22, 2021•46 min
Odette Drapeau is a leader, educator and innovator in the practice of fine bookbinding. She founded her bookbinding workshop The Headband in Montreal in 1979. For more than 50 years she has refined her work though the innovative use of materials including fish leathers, high-tech fibres and LED lights. Through her creative use of stunning textures and colours she has achieved a level of excellence that has been widely heralded, including, most recently by The Alcuin Society which bestowed its Ro...
Apr 19, 2021•1 hr 4 min
Only seventeen women have won the Nobel Prize for Literature since it started in 1901. That's 17 out of 119 winners. In order to rectify this imbalance, an important new prize has been established. The Carol Shields Prize for Fiction is "the first English-language literary award to celebrate creativity and excellence in fiction by women writers in the United States and Canada." I wanted to learn more about Carol Shields, so I read Startle and Illuminate, Carol Shields on Writing and interviewed ...
Apr 11, 2021•53 min
Dan Mozersky enjoyed a long and fruitful career in Canada's 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. 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 (CBA), he served as director, vice president, and chair of vari...
Apr 05, 2021•1 hr 14 min
Bill Waiser is a western Canadian historian. He has published more than a dozen books– many of them prize-winning. A World We Have Lost: Saskatchewan Before 1905, for example, won the 2016 Governor General’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction. Bill has been appointed to the Order of Canada, awarded the Saskatchewan Order of Merit, elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, named a distinguished university professor, and granted a D.Litt. He was the 2018 recipient of the Royal Society of Canada...
Apr 01, 2021•53 min
Matt Dorfman is an internationally recognized designer and illustrator. He is the art director of the New York Times Book Review and former art director of the New York Times Op-Ed page. Additionally, he maintains a one-person office specializing in work for publishers, film, theater and various cultural institutions. I talked with Matt recently about his selection of the best book covers of 2020 for the New York Times Book Review - dissecting his decision-making process and judgement calls. Amo...
Mar 29, 2021•50 min
Novelist, screenwriter and essayist Larry McMurtry is best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning 1985 novel Lonesome Dove , a sweeping historical epic that follows ex-Texas Rangers as they drive cattle from the Rio Grande to Montana. ( Update: Larry died yesterday, March 25, 2021). He grew up on a ranch outside of Archer City, Texas, which is the model for his fictional town of Thalia. A book collector, McMurtry purchased a rare book store in Washington, D.C.’s Georgetown neighbourhood in 1970 an...
Mar 28, 2021•20 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 Press and Red Lemonade where he published Maggie Nelson, Lynne Tillman, Vanessa Veselka’s Zazen , Alain Mabanckou, and many others. He was awarded the Association of American Publishers’ Award for Creativity in Independent Publishing in 2005. We met via Zoom (as I'm sure you'...
Mar 19, 2021•49 min
Will Schwalbe has spent most of his life in publishing: at William Morrow, and then at Hyperion, where he was Editor in Chief. In January 2008 he left Hyperion to found a startup called Cookstr.com and ran that for six years. It’s now part of Macmillan Publishers, where he has worked since 2014. His books include Send: Why People Email So Badly and How to Do it Better with his friend David Shipley. The End of Your Life Book Club , about the books he read with his mother when she was dying. And B...
Mar 14, 2021•1 hr 9 min
Since 2012, Jason Rovito has been working with institutional and private collectors to grow the documentary value of their collections "because the Cloud forgets." Subject strengths include: the avant-garde, design, the human sciences, and visual culture across the full spectrum of Special Collections formats: rare books, ephemera, manuscripts, photographs, prints, audio/visual materials, and archives. Jason is a member of the International League of Antiquarian Booksellers (ILAB), the Antiquari...
Mar 10, 2021•1 hr 2 min
Marc Côté is President of Cormorant Books , a literary publishing house noted for its discovery and development of Canadian writing talent and the publishing of Quebecois fiction translated into English. He has won Canada's Libris Award for editor of the year twice, and Cormorant has won the Libris Award for small presses three times. At Cormorant Marc has acquired and edited many award-nominated books. The Great Gatsby is a novel written by F. Scott Fitzgerald, published by Scribner's in 1925. ...
Mar 01, 2021•36 min
