Nigel Beale's Biblio File Podcast

Ever since writing this article on collecting teapots, for my friend Tony Martins , I’ve been thinking about my great uncle Sir Arthur Church. I had no idea he was such a wheel in collecting circles, back at the turn of the 20th century. All I knew was that he’d discovered a colour. A bright red, water-soluble pigment called Turacin (found in the feathers of West African birds known as Turacos), h...

Judging from Stephen Miller ’s Twitter feed, a ton of immigrants living in the United States are dangerous criminals who need to be incarcerated, exterminated or, at the very least, deported. His is a spigot of malice that drops toilet bowls full of racist hatred over the heads of “foreigners;” Miller’s tweets are pulling the same carts that Nazi-owned newspapers did years ago in Germany, during t...

The first time out we talked about the miracles he worked at Waterstones. Then we looked at his early plans for Barnes & Noble. Now James Daunt and I discuss the future: where his bookstore chains are headed, when B&N is going public, how employee pay scales have changed, why entrepreneurship enlivens everything, when he plans to retire and what he’s going to do with himself. Plus we get even more...

Bloomsbury Publishing has been in business for almost forty years. Last year it earned £361.0 million. Over the past five years it’s taken in more than £1.4 Billion. It’s one of, if not the most successful publishing ventures of the past century. How does this work? I asked Founder and Chief Executive Nigel Newton. Here we talk about, among other things, Frank Newton — Nigel’s prospecting, race ca...

Publishing books in Canada is a punishing, risky business. Even if your little enterprise makes it through, surviving years of ups and downs, in the end nobody will buy it. Not even the Americans (who have bought everything else in Canada it seems), because viability is tied to Canadian government-approved domestic list-specific grants. Pretty bleak the whole thing. Not to say that being a publish...

Interesting mix of shyness and confidence is Ken Whyte. You’ll hear both assert themselves during this conversation. Together they explain his hugely successful career as an editor in Canada over the past 40 years, if you ask me. Ken started editing at Alberta Report magazine during the eighties, then got the job, in 1994, as editor of Saturday Night magazine, one of the oldest and most venerated...

Ira Wells' new book, On Book Banning: Or, How the New Censorship Consensus Trivializes Art and Undermines Democracy , was officially released in the U.S. today, June 3, 2025, by Biblioasis . It’s a succinct, well-written, beautifully aphoristic examination of a rising trend to censor books in North America. Wells is a rising assistant professor of literature at the University of Toronto. On Book B...

Roberto Banchik-Rothschild, to use his full, official Mexican name, is the CEO of Penguin Random House ( PRH) Grupo Editorial in Mexico. He also leads the company’s publishing activities in Central America, and is responsible for the Hispanic market in the U.S. He is a charming man, a book-lover who believes that publishing has the power to change society, and people’s lives, for the better; in it...

David Moscrop is a political theorist and SSHRC postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Communication at the University of Ottawa. He studies democratic deliberation, political decision-making, and digital media, and is a contributing columnist for the Washington Post, and a writer for Maclean's Magazine  He also provides regular political commentary for television and radio. His first book Too D...

​B. Traven's​ novels and stories​ have sold m​ore than ​3​0 million copies​ over the past century, in more than 30 languages​ worldwide. He was Einstein's favourite novelist. Der Spiegel ranks his The Death Ship as the third greatest German novel ever written (okay in the past 100 years), after Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain , and Kafka's The Castle ; and yet, despite this, few today, in the Eng...

Some years ago I interviewed David McKnight about a collection of Canadian “little magazines” he’d hunted down and later donated to the University of Alberta’s Bruce Peel Library. It was very easy to get caught up in David’s enthusiasm, and I was really impressed by the catalogue he’d produced . Shortly after our conversation I learned that he didn’t just collect Canadian poetry, he was also a ser...

Michael Erdman is Head of Middle East and Central Asian Collections at The British Library with overall responsibility for all manuscript holdings in Arabic, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Chagatai, Coptic, Hebrew, Kurdish, Ottoman Turkish, Persian, and Syriac. I talked with him about my recent magazine hunting exploits in Istanbul, and how what we found fits into the overall history of magazine publishin...

I first came across Andrés Mario Zervigón’s (Cuban) name while researching a magazine that filled me with awe the first time I looked at it. AIZ, the Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung (Workers Illustrated Magazine) is an illustrated, mass circulation German periodical that was published in Berlin during the 1920s and 1930s (in Prague after 1933). It contains some of the most emotionally charged imager...

The only real acquaintance I’ve had with erotic literature came years ago when I was a teenager. I read My Secret Life, in the fat, purple Grove paperback edition. And re-read and re-read, and re-read it. Man was it exciting. Then again, not surprisingly the briefest glimpse of a bare breast (Sarah Miles’s, for example, in Ryan's Daughter ) would set me spinning back then. My having had to turn to...

Siegfried Lokatis is a retired professor of book history and former head of the University of Leipzig's​ Institute for Communication and Media Studies. He is the author of Book ​Covers of the GDR and is currently working on a history of the S. Fischer publishing house, due out in 2026. We met in Leipzig recently where Siegfried treated me to a tour of ​t​he Bibliotop 's splendid Insel Bucherei boo...

Richard Charkin has held senior posts at many major, and some minor, publishing houses in the U.K. over the past 50 years, including: Harrap, OUP, Pergamon Press, Reed Elsevier, Macmillan, Bloomsbury, and his very own Mensch Publishing . He is former President of The Book Society, the International Publishers Association and the UK Publishers Association. His book My Back Pages , An Undeniably Per...

A few years ago I interviewed Larry Grobel about his interviewing technique and some of the great interviews he’s conducted over the years, including the one he did for Playboy magazine with Marlon Brando. Ever since our conversation I’ve casually kept an eye out for issues that contain his interviews. In line with the colossal amount of real estate magazines have recently colonized in my brain, I...

A year and a half ago or so I spent the weekend in Old Montreal with my friend Tony Martins . Here’s the view from our hotel window (that development up at the top is called Habitat . It was designed by Moshe Safdie for Expo 67. My friends the poet Eric Ormsby and his wife librarian Irena Murray, used to own a unit in the place). One evening Tony and I went to dinner at this Polish restaurant.  On...

When you think of it, content aside, there’s actually quite a bit more to love in a magazine than there is in a book. Take photographs. The January 7, 1966 issue of Life magazine that I recently picked up, features a story on Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood . It’s plastered with a slew of great shots by Richard Avedon. Then there’s the stuff that illustrates the articles, in this case, an image of t...

I'm happy to report that my out-of-control recent /older /"vintage" magazine acquisition campaign continues to rage unabated. Facebook Marketplace, ebay, Maxx Sold, library bookstores, book warehouses, thrift stores, yard sales...I'm easy. Really not picky about which pub I drink at. What I hoist is based mostly on gut reaction to arresting cover and spread designs, re-sell potential (namely, is t...

I originally planned to outline the history of pamphleteering for you here and explain, with the help of Paul Wells, how I think it resembles Substacking . The fact, for example, that pamphlets were among the first things to come off the printing press in the 1450s; that Martin Luther was a big-time pamphleteer; that flippant, lively pamphlet writing effectively satirized lots of flagrantly decade...

“Lucian Bernhard (1883-1972) was one of the great founders of modern graphic design. In a career spanning nearly five decades in Berlin and New York, Bernhard laid the foundation for a new language of form and communication. His brilliant posters, advertisements, book designs and typefaces created the very look of the twentieth century and beyond. In this lavishly illustrated book, noted design hi...

I interviewed Nick Anthony a year or so ago about his experience writing a first novel and getting parts of it work-shopped. Today I catch up with him to find out what he’s been doing and where he’s at now on the road to getting his first book published. We talk about, among other things, how AI has helped him in the writing process; subjective and objective readers; the difference between screen...

It's hard to get a grip on George Weidenfeld, as it is with most interesting people. A brilliant networker, salesman, indefatigable party-thrower and book progenitor, he was a man surrounded by scores of friends who loved him, but who, at the same time, suffered from intense, life-long, loneliness. This, we learn in Thomas Harding's entertaining, balanced new biography, entitled The Maverick, Geor...

John Sargent was too young to fight in WW ll but he spent years battling Amazon and Google in the trenches on behalf of publishers and authors, protecting copyright and defending book prices. John grew up on a cattle ranch in Wyoming. Over forty years he worked at six publishing companies, including Simon & Schuster where he was the publisher of the Children’s Division, and Dorling Kindersley wher...