Nigel Beale's Biblio File Podcast

David Esslemont is an artist, designer, printmaker and bookbinder. He makes books from scratch, most recently about food, and publishes under his  Solmentes Press imprint. He was Artistic Director of the University of Wales Gregynog Press from 1985–97 and has won many book design awards including the Felice Feliciano International Award in 1991. Esslemont’s work can be found in both private and pu...

In which I talk, in rather rushed fashion, to great Canadian author and "bad" feminist Margaret Atwood about literary tourism: 'place' and her novel MaddAddam , Harvard and The Handmaid's Tale , and the Kingston Penitentiary and Alias Grace , also the real and the imaginary, the unreliability of eye witnesses, following the research, Samuel Johnson, Ernest Hemingway, food and underclothing, bodies...

November 30, 2017 marked the 350th anniversary of the birth of one the world's great satirists, Jonathan Swift. To honour the occasion I thought it would be fitting to interview an expert on humour, in this, the age of Trump. So I met recently with Maggie Hennefeld, Assistant Professor of Cultural Studies & Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota, in Minneapolis. We discuss her artic...

Scott Griffin, (born 1938) is a Canadian businessman and philanthropist best known for founding the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2000, one of the world's most generous poetry awards, and 'Poetry In Voice', a bilingual recitation competition for Canadian high schools.  Griffin is chairman, director and majority shareholder since 2002 of House of Anansi Press/Groundwood Books, and Chancellor of Bishop's...

I met with publisher Simon Dardick at his home office in Montreal to talk about the history and collecting of his long-running literary publishing house  Vehicule Press .  This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thebibliofile.substack.com/subscribe

Glenn Dixon has published two books.  Pi lgrim in the Palace of Words : A journey through the 6000 languages of Earth  was published in 2009 to rave reviews.  His second,  Tripping the World Fantastic: A journey through the music of our planet  came out in April of 2013.  He has also published travel articles and cultural pieces in major publications such as National Geographic Magazine, the New Y...

Marcello Di Cintio is a Canadian writer. He won the 2012 Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing for his book  Walls: Travels Along the Barricades.  The award was handed out on March 6, 2013 at the Writers' Trust of Canada's annual Politics and the Pen in Ottawa. Marcello was born in Calgary, Alberta where he currently lives with his wife, Moonira, and son, Amedeo. We met recently to discuss...

Rae Armantrout is an American poet generally associated with Language Poets. Armantrout was born in Vallejo, California but grew up in San Diego. She has published more than 10 books of poetry and has also been featured in a number of major anthologies. Armantrout teaches at the University of California, San Diego, where she is Professor of Poetry and Poetics. Armantrout was awarded the 2009 Natio...

The Press & Letterfoundry of Michael & Winifred Bixler is "devoted to the craft of fine letterpress printing and traditional book typography. Our extensive collection of English Monotype matrices allows us to cast from 8- to 72-point, classic book typefaces including Bembo, Dante, Walbaum, Van Dijck, Joanna, Perpetua, Garamond, Centaur & Arrighi, Ehrhardt, Fournier, Bell, Baskerville, Poliphilus,...

I met with David Mason in Kingston to talk about his memoir The Pope's Bookbinder . As the Biblioasis website wordsmiths have it: "From his drug-hazy, book-happy years near the Beat Hotel in Paris and throughout his career as antiquarian book dealer, David Mason brings us a storied life. He discovers his love of literature in a bathtub at age eleven, thumbing through stacks of lurid Signet paperba...

Matthew Tree  (born December 30, 1958) is a writer in English and Catalan. He has lived in  Barcelona  since 1984. Apart from publishing both fiction and non-fiction, he is a contributor to various newspapers and magazines such as Catalonia Today, The Times Literary Supplement , Barcelona INK,  Altaïr , El Punt Avui and L'Esguard. He has also appeared on various Catalan language radio and TV stati...

George Tremlett  (born 1939) is an English author, bookshop owner, and former politician. According to his own biography, after leaving King Edward VI School Stratford-upon-Avon, he worked for the Coventry Evening Telegraph from 1957 onward as a TV columnist and pop music reviewer. In 1961 he became a freelance rock journalist and in the 1970s wrote a series of paperbacks on pop stars, including ...

Wales celebrated the centenary of famed Welsh poet  Dylan Thomas in 2014 .  Annie Haden  is an experienced tourist guide and a specialist in the life of Thomas. With over 20 years experience in the tourism sector, Anne uses an easy listening story-telling technique which keeps her tours both interesting and informative. I caught up with her at Morgans hotel in Swansea, Thomas's home town, to talk...

I met with Andre Alexis to discuss  his novella,  A  (BookThug, 2013). During our conversation we hit, among other things, on literary criticism, book reviewing, 'Good' and 'Baddeley' literary critics, and David Gilmour and his GG Award winning novel  A Perfect Night to go to China , and Alexis's contention that racism is contained in the chapter in this novel entitled “The Pigeon”.   Please note...

Alberto Manguel is an Argentine-born writer, translator, and editor, and the author of  many books of both non-fiction, including   A History of Reading  (1996),  The Library at Night  (2007) and Homer's Iliad and Odyssey: A Biography  (2008); and fiction (  News From a Foreign Country Came  , 1991). We met at the Kingston WritersFest; I asked him to recount some of his favourite experiences in bo...

Herman Melville lived at Arrowhead (so named because of arrowheads found nearby during planting season) from 1850–1863, during which time he wrote some of his best known works:  Moby-Dick,  The Confidence-Man, and The Piazza Tales, a short story collection named after his porch, of which he wrote: Now, for a house, so situated in such a country, to have no piazza for the convenience of those who m...

The Mount  is a historic site and a cultural center inspired by the passions and achievements of Edith Wharton. Designed and built by  Wharton in 1902, the house embodies the principles outlined in her influential book, The Decoration of Houses (1897). The property includes three acres of formal gardens designed by Wharton, who was also an authority on European landscape design,  surrounded by ext...

From 1959-1964,  McClelland and Stewart published a run of poetry books written by Irving Layton, designed by Frank Newfeld, edited by Claire Pratt, and often illustrated with photographs by Sam Tata. They turned out to be among Layton’s most famous and influential titles (  A Red Carpet for the Sun  [1959],  The Swinging Flesh  [1961],  Balls for a One-Armed Juggler  [1963], and  The Laughing Roo...

This from the Yale University Library website: "William Reese '77 is an antiquarian bookseller living in New Haven, CT. His firm, William Reese Company, founded in 1975 when he was a sophomore, is one of the leading rare book dealers in the world, specializing in Americana, travels and voyages, and literature.  He has been active with the Yale Library for many years, funding a number of fellowship...

Shanty Bay Press was established in Shanty Bay, Ontario, in 1996 as a private press devoted to publishing livres d’artistes in which the texts and the illustrations accompanying them would have equal weight in the design of the books. The press is a partnership: the type-setting, presswork and binding are the work of Janis Butler, the illustrations are by Walter Bachinski, and the editorial, desig...

I attended the Kingston WritersFest and interviewed some great authors about 'place' and its relationship to their work. Here I talk with Thomas King about native myth, possibility in storytelling, his love of the Alberta Landscape - especially that which surrounds Lethbridge - and those novels of his which best capture the essence of this spectacular place.   This is a public episode. If you'd li...

Jack Kerouac is an American icon thanks to his novel On the Road (1957). During the late 1950s, he and fellow members of the Beat generation captured something essential about the American psyche, defining a desire to break away from conformity in search of an alternative form of self-fulfillment. As William S. Burroughs once put it On the Road  "sold a trillion Levis and a million espresso machin...

Alexander Monker is an Ottawa-based collector of Canadian poetry. I met recently with him to talk about his passion for these and other books, and to get some advise on the art of book collecting.  We also talk about, among other things, the kindness and knowledge of used/antiquarian booksellers, misspelled book titles online, the Contact, Gaspereau and Apt. 9 Presses, buying what you love, Anglo-...

Abigail Rorer is a wood engraver, and the proprietor of The Lone Oak Press which publishes limited edition, fine press books using...letterpress & wood engraving. One of Abigail's most delightful books is  Mimpish Squinnies:  Reginald Farrer’s Short Guide to Worthless Plants . "Reginald Farrer (1880–1920) was a British plantsman, plant explorer, & prolific writer who was one of the first to promot...

Founded in 1978, Shakespeare & Company aspires to create "a theatre rooted in the classical ideals of inquiry, balance and harmony; [and] a company that performs as the Elizabethans did — in love with poetry, physical prowess and the mysteries of the universe." Home to more than 150 artists, the company performs Shakespeare in ways which encourage collaboration between actors, directors and design...