Jonathan Kay is a Canadian journalist. He was editor-in-chief of The Walrus magazine, and is a senior editor of Quillette. He was previously comment pages editor, columnist, and blogger for the Toronto-based Canadian daily newspaper National Post, and continues to contribute to the newspaper on a freelance basis. He's also a ghostwriter, best known in this capacity as the author of Justin Trudeau's memoir Common Ground. During our conversation we talk about Jon's ghostwriting practice - riffing ...
Apr 19, 2022•1 hr 2 min
Kathryn Schulz joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in 2015. In 2016, she won the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing and a National Magazine Award for “The Really Big One,” her story on seismic risk in the Pacific Northwest. Previously, she was the book critic for New York , the editor of the environmental magazine Grist , and a reporter and editor at the Santiago Times . She is the author of Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error. We talk about Lost and Found , her just published mem...
Apr 14, 2022•53 min
Larry Grobel is a journalist, author and teacher. He has written more than 25 books including Conversations with Capote ( which received a PEN Special Achievement award) and The Art of the Interview ( which has been used as a text in many journalism schools), most of his books however are short story collections. His latest is called The Narcissist . Over the years he's written for dozens of publications including the New York Times, Rolling Stone, and Entertainment Weekly, but he's best known f...
Apr 10, 2022•1 hr 2 min
James Wood is a literary critic, essayist and novelist. He was The Guardian' s chief literary critic between 1992 and 1995, and a senior editor at The New Republic between 1995 and 2007. Since roughly that time he's taught the Practice of Literary Criticism at Harvard University and has been a staff writer and book critic at The New Yorker magazine. In 2009, he won the National Magazine Award for reviews and criticism. Books include How Fiction Works , the novel Upstate , and essay collections T...
Apr 04, 2022•1 hr 4 min
William Taylor Jr. is a cataloger with PBA Galleries, a San Francisco-based auction house for rare books and ephemera; he specializes in fine literature, counterculture and poetry. He's an avid reader, and a prolific writer. His first book of fiction is included in the curriculum at select universities across the United States. In 2013 he was the recipient of an Acker Award, a tribute named after groundbreaking writer Kathy Acker given to members of the avant-garde arts communities in both New Y...
Mar 29, 2022•37 min
Damon Galgut is a South African novelist and playwright. He was awarded the 2021 Booker Prize for his novel The Promise and shortlisted for the prize in 2003 and 2010 right about the time I first interviewed him at his apartment in Cape Town ( listen here ). Damon was head boy at Pretoria Boys High School, matriculating in 1981, and then studied drama at the University of Cape Town. He wrote his first novel, A Sinless Season (1982), when he was 17. We met via Zoom to talk about his life as a wri...
Mar 23, 2022•1 hr 9 min
Biblio.com started as a price comparison engine for new and used books in 2000. Later, this price comparison engine became SearchBiblio.com famous for several years as the Internet's fastest "metasearch" site for books. In the summer of 2003 Biblio.com launched as a used books marketplace, working off a 'triple bottom line' using these goals: achieving profit, serving people, and preserving the environment. Biblio's founder, Brendan Sherar has a life-long passion and appreciation for books. A fo...
Mar 17, 2022•46 min
Glenn Horowitz is an agent in the sale and placement of culturally significant archives to research institutions throughout the United States. Authors, artists, musicians, designers, and photographers represented include Bob Dylan, Norman Mailer, James Salter, Eve Babitz, Deborah Eisenberg, David Foster Wallace, Vladimir Nabokov, and many more. We spoke recently via Zoom about his practice: what he does and how he does it. Topics covered include polyps; making bookseller websites accessible to t...
Mar 12, 2022•1 hr 14 min
John Sargent is an American book publisher; until recently he was the CEO of Macmillan Publishers USA, and Executive Vice President of the Georg von Holtzbrinck Publishing Group where he oversaw global trade operations; he was also responsible for Macmillan Learning, the company’s US-based higher education business. We talk via Zoom about his career in publishing, not about libraries; about being sales reps, and doing cold calls; Columbia Business School, complex balance sheets and P & Ls; h...
Mar 04, 2022•1 hr 10 min
Jerry Kelly is a book designer, calligrapher and type designer. Before starting his own design business in 1998 he was Vice President of The Stinehour Press. Prior to this he worked as a designer at A. Colish. Jerry's work has been honored frequently; for example, his book designs have been selected more than thirty times for the AIGA “Fifty Books of the Year” Award. In 2015 he was presented with the 28th Goudy Award from RIT. He has served as Chairman of the American Printing History...
Feb 28, 2022•1 hr 8 min
Andrew Wylie is an American literary agent. He grew up in Sudbury, Massachusetts and attended St. Paul's School in Concord, New Hampshire. He has a degree from Harvard University where he studied Romance Languages & Literatures. Wylie founded his eponymous literary agency in New York in 1980 and opened a second office in London in 1996. The firm now represents more than 1400 authors and literary estates. We met via Zoom to discuss what he does and how he does it. We talk about, among other t...
Feb 22, 2022•1 hr 6 min
Richard Charkin is a British publishing executive. He founded Mensch Publishing in 2018. Prior to this he was Executive Director of Bloomsbury (2007 to 2018). Over the years he has held executive positions at Pergamon Press, Oxford University Press, and Reed International/Reed Elsevier. He is the former Chief Executive of Macmillan Publishers Limited and Executive Director of Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck. We met via Zoom to talk about what he's learned over the past several years running ...
Feb 18, 2022•44 min
Warren Kinsella is a Canadian lawyer, author, musician, political consultant, commentator and sometime painter. He has written for most of Canada's major newspapers and is currently a columnist for the Toronto Sun. He is the founder of the Daisy Consulting Group, a Toronto-based firm that engages in paid political campaign strategy work, lobbying and communications crisis management. Prior to this he played various roles in the Liberal government, including special assistant to Jean Chrétien, fo...
Feb 14, 2022•54 min
Steven Heller is an eminent American graphic designer, art director, art critic and scholar. He has authored or co-authored more than 200 books which variously trace the history of typography, illustration and other subjects related to graphic design. I talk with Steve here about Alvin Lustig an American American book designer, graphic designer and typeface designer. Some of Lustig's most innovative work was for New Directions, the independent publishing firm. For example, he designed mor...
Feb 07, 2022•47 min
Terry O'Reilly is a Canadian broadcast producer and personality best known for hosting the CBC radio/podcast programs O'Reilly on Advertising, The Age of Persuasion , and Under the Influence, which together have been downloaded more than 40 million times. His programs examine the cultural and sociological impact of advertising and marketing on modern life. His books include The Age of Persuasion, This I Know , and most recently, My Best Mistakes: Epic Fails and Silver Linings. We met via Zoom to...
Jan 30, 2022•55 min
Margaret Atwood is a Canadian novelist, essayist, poet, teacher, environmental activist, and inventor. She has written plenty of books, many of them prize-winners. For example, she's won "two Booker Prizes (latest in 2019, co-winner, for The Testaments ), the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the Governor General's Award, the Franz Kafka Prize, Princess of Asturias Awards, and the National Book Critics and PEN Center USA Lifetime Achievement Awards." Several of her works, including The Handmaid's Tale , h...
Jan 23, 2022•55 min
Hermione Lee was President of Wolfson College from 2008 to 2017 and is Emeritus Professor of English Literature in the English Faculty at Oxford University. She is a biographer and critic whose work includes biographies of Virginia Woolf (1996), Edith Wharton (2006) and Penelope Fitzgerald (2013, winner of the 2014 James Tait Black Prize for Biography and one of the New York Times best 10 books of 2014). She has also written books on Elizabeth Bowen, Philip Roth and Willa Cather, and a collectio...
Jan 17, 2022•52 min
"After working in computer systems analysis for a decade, John Burnside became a full-time writer in 1994. John has published 14 books of poetry, and has won the Geoffrey Faber Prize, the Whitbread Poetry Prize, the Petrarca Preis and, most recently, the Forward and T.S. Eliot Prizes for his poetry. He has also published eight novels and a memoir. He is Professor of English at the University of St Andrews." We met to talk about the what, how and why of poetry as described in his book of criticis...
Jan 10, 2022•1 hr 10 min
Jaleen Grove is a Canadian artist and art historian whose area of focus is the history of illustration in the US and Canada. She teaches at the Rhode Island School of Design, has written monographs on illustrators Oscar Cahén and Walter Haskell Hinton and has served as associate editor for the Journal of Illustration . She is associate editor of the 592-page History of Illustration (Bloomsbury, 2018), and author of a chapter in it entitled 'Avant Garde Illustration 1900-1950' which is the topic ...
Jan 01, 2022•1 hr 1 min
Steven Heller is an eminent American graphic designer, art director, art critic and scholar. He has authored or co-authored more than 200 books which variously trace the history of typography, illustration and other subjects related to graphic design. I talk with Steve about Paul Rand an American art director and graphic designer best known for his corporate designs which include logos for IBM, UPS, Westinghouse, and ABC. Rand was a professor of graphic design at Yale University ...
Dec 25, 2021•50 min
Daniel Mendelsohn "is an internationally bestselling author, critic, essayist, and translator. Born in New York City in 1960, he received degrees in Classics from the University of Virginia and Princeton. After completing his Ph.D. he moved to New York City, where he began freelance writing full time; since 1991 he has been a prolific contributor of essays, reviews, and articles to many publications, most frequently The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books ." We met via Zoom to discuss th...
Dec 17, 2021•1 hr 3 min
Fifteen years ago I interviewed Michael Cader at Book Expo in Toronto. The advice he had for publishers at the time remains remarkably fresh and valuable. Michael is the founder of Publisher's Lunch, the largest book publishing industry publication in the world. Each day it's e-mailed out to more than 45,000 people. We talk about process, and transparency, extras, the role of a creative person, finding audiences while you're alive, the satisfaction of engaging with an audience, bringing work to ...
Dec 14, 2021•32 min
William (Bill) Matthews has been dealing in old & rare books, manuscripts, maps and related material since 1976. He began working for a bookshop in Saskatoon, then opened his own in Vancouver in 1976, and subsequently moved to Toronto in 1980. He was in Ontario until 1996 when he moved to San Francisco / Berkeley and was part of Peter Howard's Serendipity Books for a few years. He's now the proud owner of The Haunted Bookshop, a bricks and mortar shop in Sydney, B.C. just north of Victoria. ...
Dec 07, 2021•47 min
Don Stewart is the proprietor of MacLeod’s Books at 455 West Pender Street in downtown Vancouver, a shop famed for its magnificent piles of books, wide selection and narrow aisles. Stewart bought MacLeod's Books in 1973 from Van Andruss who'd bought it from Don MacLeod a few years after it opened in 1964. He moved the business into larger premises in 1981 only to see the place burn down the next year - so he had to start again from scratch. Ironically, for the past ten years he's had to contend ...
Dec 02, 2021•49 min
Dr Falk Eisermann is head of the Incunabula Division at the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin and is considered a world expert in the field. He also heads the Gesamtkatalog der Wiegendrucke (Union catalogue of incunabula), GW for short. Founded in 1904 it's objective is to list all 15th-century items printed from movable type. Today the job is reportedly about fifty percent complete. Lots of work remains. I met with Falk in his green-carpeted office at the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin to talk about his r...
Nov 23, 2021•1 hr 12 min
Dan Morgan is the proprietor of an antiquarian bookstore in Prague 6 that replicates the feel and function of a living room. Back in the 1990s Dan was invited by his future wife to visit Prague. He never left. In 2008 he 'got into' books thanks to a woman who sold them in his neighbourhood and who introduced him to Czech modernism and Samizdat. Coming full circle, by good fortune he was able recently to buy the entire stock of her original bookstore. I met with Dan at his shop. We talk about the...
Nov 16, 2021•1 hr 6 min
Library exhibition catalogues, just like Bookseller catalogues, constitute a damned fine collecting area if you ask me. Beautiful, informative, and cheap - especially when you consider how much money and time, care and attention goes into producing them - they're well worth acquiring, despite not being particularly rare. What better service can I provide the collector to get a grip on this under-appreciated field than to talk to someone who evaluates them if not exactly for a full-time living, t...
Nov 03, 2021•56 min
Jordi Nadal was born in Barcelona in 1962 and holds a degree in Germanic Studies from the University of Barcelona. In 1998 he took the Stanford Professional Publishing Course and then began his career at Vicens Vives, later moving to Herder (Germany). He has been director of EDHASA, editorial and publications director of Círculo de Lectores, consultant at Random House in New York, general director of corporate development for Spain and America at Grupo Plaza & Janés and assistant director at...
Oct 25, 2021•51 min
For years Paul Delaney was professor of English at the University of Moncton; prior to this he taught at various institutions in London, England. During his lifetime he has had an ongoing interest in Acadian genealogy, a topic upon which he continues to publish and conduct research. His biography of Charles de Sousy Ricketts (1866-1931), published in 1990, was the first major study of a man whose "spirited career encompassed many aspects of late Victorian and Edwardian culture," including fine p...
Oct 19, 2021•1 hr 2 min
Andrew Coyne needs little introduction to Canadian audiences. He writes a weekly column for the Toronto Globe and Mail newspaper and is a member of the At Issue panel on CBC TV's The National newscast. He has previously been national editor of Maclean's magazine and a columnist for the National Post newspaper. James Elliott Coyne (1910-2012) was a scholar, lawyer, public servant, family man, and "practicing eccentric." A Rhodes scholar, and captain of the Oxford University hockey team, he practi...
Oct 11, 2021•1 hr 9 min
