Nigel Beale's Biblio File Podcast

Joshua Doležal is a writer and award-winning teacher with 20 years of experience in publishing and editing. His mentor was Ted Kooser, former Poet Laureate of the United States and Pulitzer Prize winner. Josh's work has appeared in more than 30 magazines including The Kenyon Review and The Chronicle of Higher Education. His memoir Down from the Mountain Top: From Belief to Belonging was short-list...

James Daunt calls him "the best of the best in U.K. publishing, constantly challenging the industry to move on when it drags its feet." Listen to my conversation with Andrew Franklin to learn why. Andrew is founder and, until recently, publisher of Profile Books, an award-winning British independent publishing house which launched in 1996. Best-selling authors on its list include Mary Beard, Marga...

Here’s how the Carcanet Press website describes him: Michael Schmidt FRSL, poet, scholar, critic and translator, was born in Mexico in 1947; he studied at Harvard and at Wadham College, Oxford, before settling in England. Among his many publications are several collections of poems and a novel, The Colonist (1981), about a boy’s childhood in Mexico. He is general editor of PN Review and founder as...

The John Rylands Research Institute and Library is one of the great libraries of the world: a research powerhouse and a major cultural institution. It’s housed in a magnificent, purpose-built ‘book cathedral’ in Manchester, England. John Hodgson is Associate Director Curatorial Practices at the University of Manchester. In his role at Rylands, John “leads a team of librarians, archivists, curators...

Andrew Nash “is Reader in Book History at the Institute of English Studies, University of London” (a leading book history scholar in other words) and Director of the London Rare Books School. We sat down in the stacks at the Mark Longman "Books about Books" Library at the University of Reading (well, actually the Museum of English Rural Life in Reading which is somehow connected to the University...

Sir Tim Waterstone revolutionized bookselling in Britain and changed the country's cultural landscape. He also wrote a memoir, called The Face Pressed Against a Window (Atlantic, 2019). We met at The Garrick Club in London to talk about the book, and about how he accomplished what he accomplished. Topics covered in our conversation include Tim's troubled relationship with his father, his eight chi...

When deciding who to interview for The Biblio File podcast I largely go with “best practitioners” who I admire. Steven Temple (1947-2023) was one of the antiquarian book dealers I admired the most. His appreciation and knowledge of the books that constitute Canadian literature and his dedication to documenting their unique characteristics was unparalleled. He was one of the very first used/antiqua...

Chris Gribble moved to Norwich from Manchester (where, among other things, he’d worked with Michael Schmidt at Carcanet Press) in 2006 to join a regional literary arts organization. Here he had a vision and, after a time, helped turn the place into the UK's National Centre for Writing. Then he spearheaded a successful effort to get Norwich designated as England’s first UNESCO City of Literature. T...

I was in Ireland recently to interview two of the best novelists on the face of the planet. John Banville, in Dublin , and David Mitchell, in Cork. As a cost-cutting measure I decided to ask them both the same questions:What do you do? How do you do it? Why do you do it? And:Why does it matter? I got diametrically opposed answers. So much for my cherished ambition of capturing definitive, unified...

Early on in this conversation there's a dead patch. The mic didn't pick up the glorious seagull call that comes reverberating down the chimney right into the room John Banville and I were sitting in [This’ll give you a flavour. Recorded it in Liverpool the other day]:   John Banville is, among other things, an Irish novelist, short-story writer, and screenwriter who hates his own work. He's won a...

Last year I interviewed Margaret Atwood about "the role" of the writer. No such thing she informed me. So we talked about the "non-role." Combatative she is. Just like Tim Parks. He talks with me here about the other end of the spectrum, the reader. How to be a better one. I want him to be prescriptive, he won’t. But he does provide a lot of excellent insights, despite his resistence. Tim is an au...

Marta Sylvestrova is a curator and art critic and has headed the graphic design department at the Moravian Gallery in Brno, Czech Republic, since 1986. She is a graduate of Masaryk University where she studied art history, and has, over the years, been involved in the organizing of many Brno Biennieles. They feature and evaluate graphic designs from around the world every two years, alternating fo...

Nic Bottomley is a bookseller, and co-owner with his wife Juliette of Mr B's Emporium of Reading Delights, an independent bookshop based in Bath that has twice been named UK Independent Bookshop of the Year. Prior to setting up shop Nic was a capital markets lawyer. He currently serves as Executive Chair of the Booksellers Association of UK and Ireland .  We spoke via Zoom about his innovative "Re...

Ricky Cavallero was CEO of the Spanish-language publisher Random House Mondadori for eight years. In 1995 he joined Mondadori as Director of Marketing Books; two years later he was appointed General Manager of the Spanish subsidiary and launched the Alexandros trilogy by Valerio Massimo Manfredi which became a huge best-seller. In 1999 he inaugurated the Grijalbo Mondadori bookshop in Havana​. ​In...

Matteo Columbo is Margaret Atwood's publicist and personal magician at the Ponte alle Grazie publishing house in Italy. We met in Milan to discuss, among other things, the relationship between magic and publicity, the things that Margaret's handlers insist must be present in her hotel rooms; banana tricks, surprises, examples of how to gain the attention of journalists, Ponte alle Grazie's eclecti...

Maria Hamrefors was appointed chairwoman of the Swedish Booksellers Association in 2019 after a long career in the book industry. Previous positions include CEO of Akademibokhandeln (Sweden’s B&N), CEO of Bokus, CEO of Norstedts Publishing Group, CEO of Thomson Corp in Sweden and director of Sweet & Maxwell Group in the UK. She is the treasurer of the European and International Booksellers Federat...

Putin is murdering Ukrainians. Xi is likely perpetrating a genocide on the Uyghurs. He's also threatening to murder Taiwanese, and he's crushing democracy in Hong Kong. Trump is ignoring the rule of law. Florida is censoring, if not burning, books. Why am I doing what I'm doing? Why have I interviewed more than 600 best practitioners about “the book”? Well precisely, in a roundabout way, to help s...

We get into what "good" means, how a new model of bookselling might be funded; establishing new institutions and supporting the cause; about the ephemeral and the eternal, stars and blossoming fruit trees, William Blake, Robert Musil, mammon, Socrates learning to play the flute, the gift of finding something, or one, to love and knowing that this too shall pass; about the joys of "the browse," and...

About a month ago I watched a documentary entitled  Capital in the 21st Century . It was pretty riveting, describing much of what, and how, I've been thinking  over the past few years about the American take-over of Canada, and the belief that the country "developed" largely because the very rich were too lazy, risk-averse and unpatriotic to invest in their own country, preferring instead to let t...

Is failure an inherent part of the writing "enterprise"? Yes, I'd say, this is undoubtedly true. If seen, however, solely as an "exercise" in itself, does this still hold true? I'm not quite so sure. These are the axes along which I tread during my conversation with Stephen Marche about his valuable new book On Writing and Failure: Or, On the Peculiar Perseverance Required to Endure the Life of a...

Sasha Tochilovsky is a graphic designer, typographer, curator, teacher and head of the Herb Lubalin Study Center of Design and Typography at the Cooper Union in New York City. We talk here about one of the greatest creative teams in magazine history: author, editor, publisher and photo-journalist Ralph Ginzburg and graphic designer and typographer Herb Lubalin. We rustle around in the work these t...

Andy Hughes is Senior Vice President of Production and Design at Knopf Doubleday, and I really wanted to know what he had to say. During a recent conversation with Lizzie Gottlieb about her new documentary film Turn Every Page, listen here , she mentioned that she regretted not being able to include what Andy had had to say about producing Bob Caro's books. So, I contacted Andy and asked him to gi...

​I booked a room at the Intercontinental Hotel in Montreal through Hotwire a couple of days ago. When I arrived at the hotel the receptionist asked me for a $250 deposit for incidentals. Next morning, without my permission (sure, okay, it's likely buried in the small print) they charged my card an additional $200. I subsequently learned that this was because I'd booked a couple of massages at thei...

My GP took off on me last year. Landed some big gig in Geneva I think. He's a bright one. Not that I knew him very well. Only met him twice in six years. Anyhow, I went in for my tri-annual (once every three) check-up the other day. The nurse was pleasant. Told me he'd been working in the same clinic for 30 years. Adventurous, I thought. Then a student comes in. Also pleasant. Bit bland, but hey,...

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 to each of the tw...