Nigel Beale's Biblio File Podcast

When I met with Rebecca Romney she was the Rare Book Expert on Pawn Stars and Manager at the Las Vegas Gallery of Bauman Rare Books. We talked about what she does, why Bauman's is in town, her blog, Aldine, Aldus the printer, William Pickering's Aldine poet's series, and collecting fine press books.    This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to...

The University of Nevada, Las Vegas Special Collections Library houses unique, rare, and specialized research material that documents the history, culture and physical environment of the city of Las Vegas, the Southern Nevada region, the gaming industry, and the University of Nevada Las Vegas. The collections include books, pamphlets, posters, serials and periodicals, scrapbooks, archives and manu...

This part was easy. I just clipped and pasted from here. "From ornate floral patterns to cityscapes, the boldest book designs of the Golden Age are gathered here. Readers accustomed to today’s more utilitarian bindings will find breathtaking images—gold leaf patterns intricate enough to replicate the shimmer of feathers, forests rendered in rich color and silver, and elegant allusions to Asian art...

Barbara Slate is the author of more than 300 comic books and graphic novels. She created, wrote and drew Angel Love for DC Comics, and Yuppies from Hell and Sweet XVI for Marvel. Her first character , Ms Liz, has  appeared on millions of greeting cards, in magazines, and on the Today Show; in addition, she wrote the Disney comic classics Beauty and the Beast and Pocahontas, plus more than 60 issue...

Poets House is a literary center and poetry archive - a collection and meeting place in New York that invites poets and the public to join the living tradition of poetry. Free and open to the public, Poets House’s 50,000-volume poetry library is among the most comprehensive, open-stacks collections of poetry in the United States. Hosting acclaimed poetry events and workshops, Poets House not only...

The Greenwich Village Literary Pub Crawl has been leading tourists into bars rich in bookish history since 1998. Inside each bar, you take a drink and listen as your actor/tour guide tells of the history of the establishment and of the great authors who have hung out, gotten drunk and written there. You’ll get recitations from relevant texts and stops at "unique sites that are literary, historical...

Richard Minsky is a celebrated American book artist,  bookbinder and scholar who at age 13 got his first printing press. In 1968, he graduated cum laude in economics from Brooklyn College, was then awarded a fellowship at Brown University, got his Master's degree in economics, and then pursued a Ph. D. at The New School for Social Research;  two years later he chucked it all for bookbinding, art a...

Edward Rutherfurd was born in England, in the cathedral city of Salisbury. Educated locally, and at the universities of Cambridge, and Stanford, California, he subsequently worked in political research, bookselling and publishing. Abandoning this career in the book trade in 1983, he returned to his childhood home to write SARUM, a historical novel with a ten-thousand year storyline, set in the are...

Without question, Friedrich Nietzsche is the go-to guy for those who want to sound smart at a cocktail party.  He's a philosophical superstar, ' the grandfather of postmodernism', an inspiration to thinkers such as Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Sarah Kofman, and Paul de Man. Nietzsche’s popularity lies, according to PhD candidate Karl Laderoute, in his rebelliousness and bombas...

  George Saintsbury (23 October 1845 – 28 January 1933), though a prolific and influential British literary critic in the late 1800s, is today perhaps best known as the author of a book on wine called Notes on a Cellar-Book (1920). According to Prof. Nicholas Margaritis, Saintsbury deserves a larger modern audience.  Why? Listen to his explanation.   This is a public episode. If you'd like to disc...

Lionel Trilling (1905 – 1975) is one of the best known U.S. critics of the twentieth century. A Professor of Literature and Criticism at Columbia University from 1931 - 1975, his teachings focused primarily on the relationships between literature, culture and politics. His first and best known collection of essays, The Liberal Imagination , was published in 1950. I met with David Southward , a Sen...

"Longinus" is the name given to the unknown literary critic/author who wrote 'On the Sublime' an essay written around 100 CE that examines the work of more than 50 ancient authors. In the essay - of which only an extended fragment remains - Longinus talks of the sublime as a state that reaches "beyond the realm of the human condition into greater mystery."  How do authors produce this state in the...

Quantum Theatre was founded in Pittsburgh in 1990 by Karla Boos. Her goal was to create a company that incorporated world culture and international trends. Quantum has been a nurturing home for Boos' evolution as an artist and for the hundreds of collaborators that have created Quantum's work. These artists draw upon the resources of image, world languages, mixed media, and the power of non-tradit...

Emilio Gil is a graphic designer, and founder of Tau Design a firm that pioneered design services, institutional communications, and the creation and development of visual corporate identity programs in Spain.  He trained at the SVA (School of Visual Arts) in New York under professors Milton Glaser, James McMullan and Ed Benguiat, and studied curating at Central St. Martins in London. For his 1995...

Strange Victories: Grove Press, 1951-1985 was a major exhibition about the Grove Press that ran at the Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Library in Syracuse. Grove was founded by Barney Rosset in 1951 and is one of the world's great twentieth-century avant-garde publishing houses. It's credited with having introduced many important international authors to American readers d...

Mark Tredinnick , winner of the Montreal Poetry Prize (2011) and the Cardiff Poetry Prize (2012), is the author of The Blue Plateau, Fire Diary, and nine other acclaimed works of poetry and prose. He lives in the highlands southwest of Sydney, Australia. Tredinnick is “one of our great poets of place—not just of geographic place, but of the spiritual and moral landscapes as well,” according to Jud...

Waiting for the Barbarians is a novel  written by the South African-born Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee. Published in 1980 it won the James Tait Black Memorial and Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prizes for fiction. The book's title comes from a poem by Greek-Egyptian poet Constantine P. Cavafy. American composer Philip Glass wrote an opera based on the book which premiered in 2005. In August 2012, the Baxt...

I met with Canadian poet/critic Michael Lista several months ago to discuss the state of poetry reviewing in Canada, the need for honesty in criticism, and his take on poet/philosopher Jan Zwicky 's essay “The Ethics of the Negative Review,” in which she defends her practice, while review editor in the 1990s of The Fiddlehead literary journal, of not publishing negative reviews. Buckle up and enjo...

Robert Fowler has had a distinguished career as a Canadian diplomat and public servant.  From 1989 - 1995 he was deputy minister of National Defence; from 1995 - 2000, Canada's ambassador to the United Nations, and, following that, ambassador to Italy  from 2000-2006. Over the years he has served as foreign policy advisor to three Prime Ministers, and as Personal Representative for Africa. On Dec....

 Corey Redekop has been many things: "actor, waiter, disc jockey, cameraman, editor, lawyer (almost), and now the fabled trifecta of publicist/librarian/author. His debut novel, Shelf Monkey , is either a work of insane genius or an intolerable left-wing screed, depending on which review you read. Stunningly handsome, supremely talented, superbly gifted at hyperbole, Corey abides in Fredericton, N...

Laurie Lewis began her publishing career in New York City with Doubleday in the early 60s, acting as liaison between the book design  and printing departments. In 1963 she moved to Toronto and joined the University of Toronto Press. When Allan Fleming came on board as Chief Designer in 1968 the new Design Unit was formed and Lewis became Fleming’s assistant. The department produced many important...

According to his website , Ross King is "the bestselling author of six books on Italian, French and Canadian art and history. He has also published two historical novels, Domino (1995) and Ex-Libris (1998), and edited a collection of Leonardo da Vinci's fables, jokes and riddles. Translated into more than a dozen languages, his books have been nominated for a National Book Critics' Circle Award, t...

Julie Bruck is the author of three collections of poems from Brick Books , Monkey Ranch (2012) The End of Travel (1999), and The Woman Downstairs (1993).  Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Ms,  Ploughshares, The Walrus, The Malahat Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Maisonneuve, Literary Mama, and elsewhere. Montreal-born and raised, Julie has taught at several colleges and universities in C...

Born in Topeka, Kansas, Linda Spalding (née Dickinson) is a Canadian writer and editor who has, over the years, worked as a professor of English and writing at numerous universities. She currently lives in Toronto, is an editor with Brick magazine, and is married to novelist Michael Ondaatje.   Spalding's  novel The Purchase  won the 2012 Governor-General’s Literary Award for English Fiction. We m...

Well known Canadian author/biographer Charlie Foran , playing the Literary Tourist, travelled to Wingham, Ontario and environs to spend a little time in Alice Munro country. I talked to him recently about his experience.  Photo credits: © James Lahey 2010 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...