Nigel Beale's Biblio File Podcast

Leslie Weir was the University Librarian at the University of Ottawa from 2003 to 2018. She became Librarian and Archivist of Canada in August, 2019. Ms. Weir is the first woman to hold this position since the National Library of Canada and the National Archives of Canada were merged to form Library and Archives Canada in 2004. She was born and raised in Montreal, earned a Bachelor of Arts in Cana...

Of course Dublin is where the biggest Bloomsday Festival takes place each on June 16th, with celebrations set in many of the "original sites" sited in James Joyce's novel Ulysses . But did you know that the second biggest celebration in the world takes place every year in Montreal? It's grown quickly over the past four or five years, and is now a five-day affair. Dave Schurman is the president of...

Paul Litt is a historian of public life in late twentieth-century Canada. His research explores the cultural workings of modern Canadian mass democracy focusing on the media, the politics of image, tourism, the politicization of identities, and nationalism.  He is currently a Professor at Carleton University in Ottawa.  We met in his office to talk about 20th century Canadian government book publi...

Michael Dirda is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Washington Post Book World and the author of the memoir “An Open Book” and of four collections of essays: “Readings,” “Bound to Please,” “Book by Book” and “Classics for Pleasure.” Dirda was born in Lorain, Ohio, graduated with highest honors in English from Oberlin College, and received a Ph. D. in comparative literature (medieval studie...

Miami native Mitchell Kaplan is the owner/founder of Books & Books , one of the premier independent bookstore groups in the United States, and a respected leader in the book business. Along with Eduardo J. Padrón, president of Miami-Dade College (MDC), he co-founded The Miami Book Fair (MBF), the largest event of its kind in the United States, in 1984. He hosts the Literary Life with Mitchell Kapl...

This is one of the very earliest Biblio File interviews. Please excuse the audio. (Listening to it - I'm embarrassed to learn that I wasn't able to read all of Certainty before conducting the interview - despite not having had much time to prepare [This would never happen today - well, except in the case of Eimear McBride's A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing , but that's another story] ).  Madeleine Th...

Sydney Smith was born in rural Nova Scotia and started drawing at an early age. Since graduating from NSCAD University, he has illustrated numerous children’s books, including the highly acclaimed wordless picture book Sidewalk Flowers , conceived by Jon Arno Lawson. It won a Governor General’s Award, among many other honours, and was named a New York Times Best Illustrated Children’s Book. Sydney...

Blake Gopnik is an American/Canadian art critic who has lived in New York City since 2011 writing about art for Newsweek, the Daily Beast, The New York Times and others. From 2000 to 2010 he was chief art critic at The Washington Post, prior to which he was arts editor and critic for the Globe and Mail in Toronto. He has a doctorate in art history from Oxford University, and has written on aesthet...

Don Gillmor is an award-winning Canadian novelist, journalist and children's book author. His new book To the River (2018) explores his brother’s suicide. It won the 2019 Governor General’s Literary Award for non-fiction and was a CBC Best Books of 2019. His novel Long Change (2015) examines the world of oil through the life and loves of one man. Mount Pleasant (2013) is a darkly comic meditation...

"Helene Atwan  is the Director of Beacon Press , an independent non-profit book publisher founded in 1854. She began her publishing career in 1976 at Random House in New York as an assistant editor in their College Division, before moving to Alfred A. Knopf in 1977 as a publicity associate. She then joined The Viking Press in 1979 as the associate director of publicity. In 1981, she moved to Farra...

David Gilmour is a Canadian novelist and former television journalist and film critic.     Born in London, Ontario, Gilmour later moved to Toronto for schooling. He is a graduate of Upper Canada College and the University of Toronto. In 1980 he became managing editor of the  Toronto International Film Festival , a post he held for four years. In 1986 he joined CBC Television as a film critic for ...

Paul Wright was Editor of the UMass Press from 1988 to 2006.  He was Executive Editor of the Book Series, “Studies in Print Culture and the History of the Book,” from 1994–2006.  From 1985 to 1988 he was Assistant to the Chancellor of the University of Massachusetts Boston. Prior to that he served as a Free-Lance Editor and Writer, from 1981–1985. Before that he worked as Acquisitions Editor for s...

Stephanie Burt is a literary critic and poet who is Professor of English at Harvard University and a transgender activist. The New York Times has called her "one of the most influential poetry critics of [her] generation". Burt grew up near Washington, D.C. She has published four collections of poetry and many works of literary criticism. Her articles have appeared in The New York Times Book Revie...

Simon Beattie is a British antiquarian bookseller, literary translator and composer. He was the first British bookseller to be featured in Fine Books & Collections Magazine 's series Bright Young Things.   Beattie was educated at Aylesbury Grammar School and the University of Exeter, where he took a double first in German and Russian (1997) and subsequently studied for an MA in Lexicography (1998)...

The Osborne Collection of Early Children's Books contains more than 80,000 items. The nucleus of the collection, which has a cut-off date of 1910, was donated to the Toronto Public Library in 1946 by a British librarian from Derbyshire, Edgar Osborne. Unable to get any English libraries to meet his conditions -  to properly house his books, describe them and publish a catalogue - he settled on Tor...

Robert Darnton is Harvard University's Carl H. Pforzheimer Professor, Emeritus and University Librarian, Emeritus He was educated at Harvard and Oxford (where he was a Rhodes scholar). After a brief stint as a reporter for The New York Times, he became a junior fellow in the Society of Fellows at Harvard. He taught at Princeton from 1968 until 2007 when he came to fill the roles mentioned above. A...

Jessie Amaolo is a librarian at the Toronto Public Library responsible for their world-class Arthur Conan Doyle collection. Not surprisingly, much of the collection is devoted to Doyle's most famous character, Sherlock Holmes. But Conan Doyle wrote much more than just the Sherlock Holmes stories. He also wrote extensively on spiritualism, true crime, history, and current events. The collection is...

  George Andreou was appointed director of the Harvard University Press (HUP) in September, 2017, replacing William P. Sisler, who had been in the position for some 27 years. Born in New York, Andreou spent much of his early childhood in Greece. He graduated from Harvard College in 1987 with a degree in English literature and languages. Prior to coming to Harvard he was senior editor and vice pres...

David Emblidge spent his childhood in Buffalo, New York and "on the sunny beaches of Ontario’s Lake Erie." After university he worked at the Associated Press as a reporter covering everything from the "disappearance of rural doctors to hog futures, and one murder." Before entering the publishing trade as a second career he spent ten rewarding years as a professor following on degrees in English (U...

Greg Gibson is the author of four books, including Gone Boy: A Walkabout about the murder of his eighteen-year-old son Galen . After receiving his BA from Swathmore College in 1967, Greg enlisted in the United States navy and worked as a shipfitter until 1971. After his discharge in 1971 he moved to Gloucester, Mass. and worked in a variety of manual jobs until 1976 when he opened Ten Pound Book C...

" Heather O'Donnell  grew up in the library stacks and bookstore aisles of suburban Delaware. In 1989, she moved to New York City, where she studied English at Columbia, and held down a series of bookish jobs on the side: working the cash register at the Strand, shelving photobooks in the Avery Library, sifting the slush pile at  Grand Street. While writing her doctoral dissertation in the Yale En...

Matthew Budman lives in Manhattan with his wife, political theorist Cristina Beltrán, and all the books they can squeeze into their apartment. Budman is the author of Instant Expert: Collecting Books (House of Collectibles), which sold nearly 10,000 copies, and Book Collecting Now: The Value of Print in a Digital Age , published in 2019. It's an engaging guide to building a book collection and cel...

Founded in 1884, the Grolier Club is America’s oldest and largest society for bibliophiles and enthusiasts in the graphic arts. Named after Jean Grolier (1489/90-1565), the collector renowned for sharing his library with friends, the Club’s objective is to promote “the study, collecting, and appreciation of books and works on paper.” Through the efforts more than eight hundred members the Club pur...

Jerry Kelly is a calligrapher, book and type designer. His work has been honored many times - his designs have been selected more than thirty times for the AIGA “Fifty Books of the Year.” In 2015 he was presented with the Goudy Award from The Rochester Institute of Technology. Kelly has served as Chairman of the American Printing History Association, and President of The Typophiles. He is an activ...

McNally Jackson Books is an independent bookstore based in New York City owned and operated by Sarah McNally, a former editor at Basic Books and the daughter of Holly and Paul McNally, founders of McNally Robinson Booksellers based in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Sarah opened her first of seven stores in 2004 as a branch of McNally Robinson. In August 2008 she established McNally Jackson as an independent...