The Biblio File hosted by Nigel Beale

In 1967 Barry Moser moved from Tennessee to New England to teach at The Williston Academy in Easthampton, Massachusetts. He was soon introduced to Leonard Baskin with whom he studied at Baskin's Gehenna Press. In the spring of 1969 Moser was commissioned to illustrate a trade book,  The Flowering Plants of Massachusetts  (it wasn't published until 1979). He became fascinated with plants and plant...

Carey Cranston took on the role of President of the American Writers Museum in September of 2016. Prior to that Carey served for 12 years as President of Fox College,  a private career college in Chicago, and prior to that he was a Vice President at Hill & Knowlton, a global PR firm, where he led the digital and web services division  We met at the Museum, and talked about, among other things, the...

David McKnight is an accomplished librarian and book collector, "imbued with remarkable passion and resolve." As Director of the Rare Book and Manuscript Library (RBML), at the University of Pennsylvania David is responsible for insuring stewardship, management, discovery, and preservation of the collection and for maintaining the visibility of RBML within and outside of the Penn community. At the...

Levi Stahl is the marketing director of the University of Chicago Press and the editor of  The Getaway Car: A Donald E. Westlake Nonfiction Miscellany .  We met in Chicago to discuss the role of the book marketer, getting books out into the world and bought, helping the sales department, Thoreau, content and numbers, advertising and the price point of books, print on demand and short runs, shelf a...

Wayson Choy was born in Vancouver in 1939. He spent his childhood in the city's Chinatown and subsequently attended the University of British Columbia where he studied creative writing. He moved to Toronto in 1962, and taught at Humber College from 1967 to 2004. His novel  The Jade Peony  (1995) won the Trillium Book Award and the City of Vancouver Book Award. His novel  All That Matters , was pub...

James Pollock  is the author of  Sailing to Babylon , which was a finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Governor General's Literary Award in Poetry, and  You Are Here: Essays on the Art of Poetry in Canada , a finalist for the  ForeWord Review's  Book of the Year Award for a collection of essays. He is also the editor of  The Essential Daryl Hine , which made  The Partisan 's list of the b...

As the editor of  Rain Taxi Review of Books , Eric Lorberer is responsible for the voice and style that has brought the magazine widespread acclaim. He is also the director of the  Twin Cities Book Festival , has served as a panelist for the National Endowment for the Arts, and speaks at conferences and literary festivals around the country as an advocate for independent publishing and literary cu...

Eric Ormsby  is a poet, a writer, and a man of letters. He was a longtime resident of Montreal, where he was the Director of University Libraries and subsequently a professor of Islamic thought at  McGill University Institute of Islamic Studies . Presently, he lives and writes in France and Prague. Ormsby began writing poetry as a young man and began publishing in 1985. He has produced six poetry...

Will Rueter is the proprietor of the Aliquando Press which was founded in 1962 "to enable its proprietor to learn the basics of printing and binding books by hand." To date the Press has produced 109 books. It is located in Dundas, Ontario. Thomas James Cobden-Sanderson was a renowned British bookbinder, and passionate private printer. He was proprietor of the Doves Press, one of the most influent...

Steven Temple is an antiquarian bookseller who, after operating shops on Queen Street in Toronto for forty years, moved to Welland, Ontario in 2014 where he now does business out of his home. He continues to specialize in literary books, especially Canadian literary books, general Canadiana, and select out-of-print and rare books in various fields.  We met at his home in Welland, where we discusse...

James King is the author of six novels and nine biographies, including books on David Milne, Margaret Laurence, Jack McClelland, and Lawren Harris. His biography of Herbert Read,  The Last Modern , was nominated for the Governor General's Literary Award. A fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, James lives in Hamilton, Ontario. And that's where I met him to discuss his biography of Jack McClelland...

Darrel J. McLeod is Cree from treaty eight territory in Northern Alberta. Before deciding to pursue writing in his retirement, he was a chief negotiator of land claims for the federal government and executive director of education and international affairs with the Assembly of First Nations. His memoir Mamaskatch: A Cree Coming of Age won the 2018 Governor General's Literary Award for non-fiction....

Marvin Post is the owner of Attic Books in London, Ontario - one of the largest, most successful used/antiquarian bookstores in Canada.  I met with Marvin to discuss the reasons behind his success. Among other things we talk about buying lots of books, religious books, double downsizing, millennial debt-load, fresh stock, on-line versus in-store stock, buying buildings, skulls on shirts, shows, ar...

Sarah Henstra is a professor of English literature at Ryerson University in Toronto where she teaches courses in Gothic Horror, Fairy Tales & Fantasies, Psychoanalysis & Literature, and Creative Writing. She is the author of The Red Word , a novel that recently won the Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction.  We met in Ottawa to talk about  The Red Word . Among other things we discuss The S...

HEATHER O'NEILL  is a novelist, short-story writer and essayist. Her work, which includes  Lullabies for Little Criminals ,  The Girl Who Was Saturday Night and Daydreams of Angels, has  been shortlisted for the Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction, the Orange Prize for Fiction and the Scotiabank Giller Prize in two consecutive years, and has won CBC Canada Reads, the Paragraphe Hugh MacL...

Katharine Streip received her Ph. D. in Comparative Literature from the University of California at Berkeley. She has published essays on Marcel Proust, Jean Rhys, Philip Roth, and William S. Burroughs. Her research interests include comedy, the novel, 19th c. Paris and modernism. I'm sitting in on some of her classes at Concordia University's Liberal Arts College , which offers "a unique Great Bo...

Sophie Schneideman has been an international rare book and print dealer for over 28 years, serving a long apprenticeship at Maggs Bros, an eminent book firm in Mayfair, and dealing as Sophie Schneideman Rare Books since 2007. She specializes in several areas of book collecting, the main focus being the Art of the Book, i.e. book illustration, private presses, fine binding, fine printing and livres...

Henry Hitchings is an author, reviewer and critic, specializing in narrative non-fiction, with a particular emphasis on language and cultural history. His second book,  The Secret Life of Words: How English Became English , won the 2008  John Llewellyn Rhys Prize . He is the president of the Johnson Society of Lichfield. As of 2018, he is chair of the drama section of the UK's  Critics' Circle . H...

I met with members of the Canada Council's Supporting Artistic Practice Program team last month to discuss changes made in 2017 to the literary book publishing grant program. Among other things we talk about the fact that programs are designed to benefit all Canadians, about phases in the spectrum of activities in artistic creation, supporting writers versus book production, professional developme...

The Bookseller is a British magazine reporting news on the publishing industry. In 2010 it was acquired from Nielsen by its then Managing Director,  Nigel Roby , who is now Chief Executive, Owner and Publisher of the new, expanded entity.  I met with Nigel at The Bookseller 's offices across the Thames from the Houses of Parliament, in London. Among other things we talk about the history and purpo...

James Daunt is Managing Director of the Waterstones chain of bookstores in England. Has been since 2011. We met at the Piccadilly store in London to talk about, among other things, J.P. Morgan, New York, silver spoons and begging bowls, genuine passion, store energy, author event programs, bookshops as social places, a core of regular customers, identifying up-and-coming writers, booksellers who r...

Stephen Page is the Chief Executive Officer at Faber & Faber .  We met at his offices in Bloomsbury, London, and invited Geoffrey Faber into the room. The three of us talk, among other things, about publishers being a race apart, comets, the unevenness of publishing, the low barriers to entry, maintaining humility, Paul Hamlyn, colour books and technological breakthroughs, the elasticity of books,...

Will Atkinson is Managing Director of Atlantic Books, U.K. Prior to this he was, for many years, with Faber & Faber , serving as Director of Sales & Marketing from 2006 to 2014. During this time he spearheaded the Independent Alliance , a very successful sales organization that comprises some of the U.K.'s leading independent publishers, including Granta and Canongate.  I met with Will at his offi...

Hannah Knowles, Senior Commissioning Editor at Canongate Books in London, tells me what she does. I question her with the help of Geoffrey Faber. We talk, among others things, about track records, The Beautiful Poetry of Donald Trump , books with legs, back-lists, bestsellers, Robert Webb's How Not to be a Boy , selling rights internationally, inclusive lists, illustrated books, the right length o...