A perceptive devotee of the podcast told me last week that he thought I was an ignoramus. 'You don't think it takes talent to be a photographer (referring to something said during this conversation with Michael Torosian, maker of fine press photography books, here )?' 'I do think it takes talent,' I responded. 'I just don't know how much. The case hasn't been made very well I don't think for photographers. Besides, true artistic genius is rare, regardless of what field you're talking about.' 'Wh...
Jan 03, 2023•1 hr 9 min
Here is Part ll of my conversation with Michael Torosian featuring his soon to be released memoir/bibliography Lumiere Press: Printer Savant and Other Stories (listen to Part l here ) . This episode gets to the essence of Michael's book writing/publishing practice: the interview. We discuss a list of guidelines Michael has developed based on his experience interviewing some of greatest photographers of the 20th century. It can be found in Savant in a chapter entitled 'Residual Landscapes, The Ph...
Dec 24, 2022•41 min
Michael Torosian has spent his life taking photographs, interviewing great photographers, and making fine press photography books. He's in the process of making another entitled Lumiere Press, Printer Savant and Other Stories to commemorate the establishment of the Lumiere Press Archive at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library in Toronto. It's full of life lessons and back-stories illuminating each of the twenty-two books he's published over the past four decades. We sat down in his workshop, behi...
Dec 19, 2022•1 hr 25 min
John Metcalf is angry that after working in Canada as a "storyteller, editor, novelist, essayist, and critic" for more than fifty years his books still only sell about 500 copies each. Regardless of this, he's made a significant contribution to Canadian literature through his editing, teaching, critiquing, compiling of anthologies, publishing, and promotion generally of Canadian writers and the short story form. His work is known for its satire, intense emotion and imagery. In fact, his whole ca...
Dec 10, 2022•1 hr 26 min
In an email I received several months ago, the owners of the iconic Washington, D.C. based independent bookstore Politics & Prose wrote that Mark LaFramboise, their chief book buyer, had died. “Mark was the best book buyer any independent bookstore could hope for,” Brad Graham and Lissa Muscatine said in their note. "Not only did he know books; he knew P&P’s customers, who gravitated to him because his passion for literature was infectious. Mark also was greatly appreciated by local auth...
Nov 30, 2022•41 min
Tom Devlin is a key figure in the world of graphic novels. His career mimics the evolution of the genre. As founder of Highwater Books, a publishing house he set up in the early 2000s, he treated alternative comics audiences in North America to their first book-length exposure to future star cartoonist/authors John Porcellino, Marc Bell, Ron Rege Jr., Brian Ralph and others - many of whom subsequently joined him at Drawn and Quarterly, the Montreal-based publishing house founded by Chris Olivero...
Nov 22, 2022•1 hr 17 min
Shannon DeVito is Barnes and Noble 's 'Director of Books.' We met via Zoom to discuss the roles and duties associated with this intriguing-sounding position. I discovered that they include co-ordinating the relationship between national and local book-buying teams; 'assortment' work; creating initiatives - including prizes ( e.g. the Discover Prize; most recent winner: The Rabbit Hutch , a debut novel which I'll shortly be 'book-clubbing' [having bookclub-type discussion, so to say] with James D...
Nov 14, 2022•51 min
Where does editing leave off and ghostwriting begin? How cool is it to pass yourself off as the writer if you haven't done any of the writing? How much recognition do "collaborators" deserve? Should ghostwriters be completely anonymous? When should they refuse assignments? How does one work with a person whose views are opposed to yours? Where does craft end and art take over? What explains a successful collaboration? Is this whole business ethical? I ask these and other bumptious questions of s...
Nov 07, 2022•1 hr 13 min
Earlier this year a tiny Quebec-based children's publishing house, Monsieur Ed , won the prize for Best Children’s Publishers of the Year in North America at the Bologna Book Fair. It won, judges said, for being at the forefront of innovation in the creative nature of its editorial choices during the past year. I thought this was a big deal so I contacted publisher and creative director Valérie Picard. She told me (well, actually, it's written on the website), that Monsieur Ed "favors stories se...
Oct 31, 2022•1 hr 4 min
Allan Fleming (1929 – 1977) was a Canadian graphic designer best known for having created the Canadian National Railway logo, for designing the 1967 book Canada: A Year of the Land and for "revolutionizing" the look of scholarly publishing in North America in the 1970s with his work at University of Toronto Press. In 1953 Allan moved to England to work as a graphic designer, and to learn about the practice from eminent English designers and design historians such as Stanley Morison, Oliver Simon...
Oct 24, 2022•1 hr 17 min
I first became aware of the graphic edition of Timothy Snyder's book On Tyranny during a visit to the National Socialist Documentation Centre museum in Munich about a year ago (revel in the backstory here ). I bought and read a copy of the original edition shortly thereafter. It's a powerful book, full of important, actionable lessons. This past Summer I picked up a copy of Nora Krug 's illustrated version of the book. Reading it was revelatory. I simply had to interview her. So I contacted the ...
Oct 11, 2022•1 hr 15 min
Libri Prohibiti is a nonprofit, independent, archival research library located in Prague, Czech Republic that collects samizdat and exile literature. Founded by Jiri Gruntorad after the fall of the communist regime its holdings include some 40,000 monographs, periodicals, reference resources, and audiovisual materials. In addition to dissident articles, many popular books were banned, and subsequently distributed as samizdats including George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and J.R.R. Tolkien’s Th...
Sep 26, 2022•53 min
Naomi Bacon is a seasoned book marketer, and founder of The Tandem Collective. She has worked with JK Rowling’s agency, The Blair Partnership, as well as Pottermore, Pan Macmillan, Penguin and Hachette. Her ambition has always been "to be at the forefront of digital innovation, creating meaningful connections between publishing partners, content creators and brands to generate word of mouth around new book, film, theatre and TV releases." We talk about how she came up with her "Readalong" servic...
Sep 18, 2022•53 min
Michael Žantovský is a Czech diplomat, author and translator. He is a former Czech Ambassador to the United Kingdom, as well as to Israel and the United States. He has translated more than fifty works of fiction, drama and poetry, mostly by contemporary American and British writers including James Baldwin, Norman Mailer, Joseph Heller, E.L. Doctorow, and Tom Stoppard. Non-fiction translations include works by Henry Kissinger and Madeleine Albright. He is currently the Executive Director of the V...
Sep 12, 2022•50 min
John Owen is a bookseller who runs the events program at the English Bookshop at Dussmann das KulturKaufhaus in Berlin. That English Bookshop? Probably the best I've ever been in, in my life. We talk about, among other things: being blown away; bookshop lighting; window seating; how to display books; mixing things up and discovering new titles; bookshops as cultural institutions; Sally Rooney; sales of English language books in Germany; trying to reduce references to Margaret Atwood in this podc...
Sep 05, 2022•1 hr 6 min
Elisabeth Ruge is a German editor, publisher and literary agent. She currently heads the Elisabeth Ruge Agency which she founded in 2014. In 1994 she established the Berlin Verlag publishing house together with her then husband Arnulf Conradi and Veit Heinichen. I met Elisabeth at her home on the outskirts of Berlin to discuss the roles she has played over her career, including the one she currently plays as Germany's leading literary agent. Among other things we talk about the importance of "at...
Aug 27, 2022•1 hr
Jonathan Landgrebe is the publisher of Suhrkamp Verlag. We met at his offices in Berlin to talk about his role as head of one of Germany's most revered publishing houses, and to riff off Siegfried Unseld's book The Author and His Publisher. Topics covered in our conversation include: important books that just don't sell; the publisher-author relationship; books that change both readers and the world; explaining and transferring feelings and enthusiasms to others; forcing values on the public; th...
Aug 19, 2022•1 hr 9 min
Pamela Paul was books editor at the New York Times from 2013 to March 2022 when she became an opinion columnist for the newspaper. We talk mostly about the role that books editors play in the lifecycle of 'the book.' I also whine a fair amount about how I don't like the fact that she left her position plus we diverge into discussion about Pamela's recent opinion piece 'There's More Than One Way to Ban a Book.' Topics tackled also include self-censorship in the publishing business (being a terrib...
Aug 13, 2022•1 hr 11 min
Why listen to James Marsh ? Because he knows about love and encyclopedias. He grew up in The Junction district of Toronto surviving a difficult childhood, and began his career in publishing at Holt Rinehart and Winston where he was editor of a Centennial history of Canada entitled Unity and Diversity. He later became executive editor of McClelland and Stewart's Carleton Library Series , after which he was hired by Mel Hurtig as editor-in-chief of The Canadian Encyclopedia - the biggest printing/...
Aug 07, 2022•48 min
Nick Anthony is a writer, stand-up comic, and screen-writer. He's participating in this year's Prague Summer Program for Writers and his novel, tentatively entitled Two Hits of Acid in Cambodia , was just workshopped this past week. We talk about the experience, but not before discussing magic, stand-up comedy writing; new material that kills; God complexes; screen-writing; Tarantino's Django Unchained ; suspense and humour; intelligence and humour; doubt; and Dave Chappelle. We then talk about ...
Jul 15, 2022•56 min
Why listen to Alexandra Pringle ? Because Richard Charkin told me that she's the best editor in the English speaking world, that's why. Alexandra was editor-in-chief at Bloomsbury Publishing for more than two decades. She was recently appointed Executive Publisher. She began her publishing career at the British magazine Art Monthly before joining the women's publisher Virago in 1978. She became Editorial Director in 1984, and moved to Hamish Hamilton in 1991 to undertake the same role. Through m...
Jul 11, 2022•51 min
What's not to like here? Marius Kociejowski is charming, erudite and funny. Why should you listen to him? He's just written a memoir about the soul of the book trade. What happens in bookstores doesn't happen elsewhere he says. The multifariousness of human nature is more on show here than anywhere else, he says, and "I think it’s because of books, what they are, what they release in ourselves, and what they become when we make them magnets to our desires.” The memoir is called A Factot...
Jul 04, 2022•1 hr 10 min
I'm in Prague for the Summer. Going to be participating in one of the world's leading creative writing programs. I interviewed its founder Richard Katrovas. Why listen to Richard? Having run the Prague Summer Program for Writers for more than two decades, he knows a lot about the process of teaching creative writing; plus he knows karate. We talk about listening and critiquing artfully, not fucking with style, the formalization of a sense of literary community; counter-culture, the literary conv...
Jun 26, 2022•57 min
Why did I interview Mark Andrews? Because he's a fellow Canadian, he's an exceptional book collector who brings an engineer's mind to the task, and he's just published a beautiful book featuring selections from his book collection, entitled The Science and Engineering of Water; An illustrated catalogue of books and manuscripts on Italian hydraulics, 1500 - 1800 ; it's exemplary. Exactly the kind of thing every book collector should think about doing - in some iteration - with his/her/their own c...
Jun 20, 2022•1 hr 3 min
Why am I interviewing Mark Samuels Lasner for a third time? Because he's a recognized and respected book collector who knows how to speak intelligently and amusingly about books. And though we've already talked about his impressive collections that cover late 19th century British literary culture, and The Bodley Head, I wanted to learn about what happens "after the dopamine" hits. What he's done with his collections - the cataloguing, the scholarship, the exhibitions, the research, the talks - h...
Jun 13, 2022•43 min
I came across Kat McKenna 's name in an article written by Alison Flood in The Guardian last year . I'd googled Tik Tok's "Book-Tok" because I'd heard it was moving a lot of YA books and wanted to learn more. Kat was quoted in Alison's piece. It was clear she knew what made BookTok tick. I contacted her and now she's on the show. Kat has worked in UK publishing for almost 15 years specialising in children's and teen/YA marketing and brand strategy, and "delivers exciting and audience driven mark...
May 30, 2022•49 min
Stephen Enniss is director of the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas in Austin. Previous posts include Head Librarian at the Folger Shakespeare Library and Director of Emory University's Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library where he made a series of impressive acquisitions including the archives of Seamus Heaney, Salman Rushdie and Ted Hughes. Since taking over at the Ransom Center in 2013, Stephen has overseen the acquisition of the archives of Ian McEwan, J.M. Coetzee, Kazuo...
May 24, 2022•1 hr
Sarah Miniaci is a freelance book publicist with fifteen years of experience in the New York and Toronto markets. Ken Whyte's Sutherland House is one of her clients. Ken interviewed Sarah for a recent issue of Shush , his excellent Substack newsletter on the publishing business. Together they surveyed today's new publishing landscape. With the help of Michael Legat's An Author's Guide to Publishing, Sarah and I do the same here, only with our voices, tracing the evolution of book publicity from ...
May 14, 2022•1 hr 9 min
Author/historian Stuart Kells has been chasing rare books and other bookish treasures since childhood. In the 1980s he went for classic sci-fi paperbacks from Ace and Dell, and authors such as Philip K. Dick and Robert Heinlein. When he moved to Melbourne in the summer of 1989 he was amazed by the city’s bookshops, especially secondhand shops - notably Alice’s and Sainsbury’s in Carlton. When he wasn’t looking for books here he was fossicking in the Co-op bookshop at Melbourne University, or h...
May 03, 2022•1 hr 14 min
Over the past half-century, bookselling, like many retail sectors, has evolved from an business dominated by independent bookstores to one in which chain stores have significant market share. This transformation has often been a less-than-smooth process, especially so in bookselling, argues Laura J. Miller, because more than most other consumer goods, books are the focus of passionate debate. What drives this debate? And why do so many people believe that bookselling should be immune to question...
Apr 25, 2022•53 min
