The Biblio File hosted by Nigel Beale

Richard Charkin is a British publishing executive who has worked in the publishing business since 1972. He has held executive positions at  Pergamon Press ,  Oxford University Press ,  Reed International / Reed Elsevier  and Current Science Group, and is the former Chief Executive of  Macmillan Publishers  Limited and Executive Director of Verlagsgruppe  Georg von Holtzbrinck . We met in Bloomsbur...

Throughout my twenties I harboured a strong desire to read the Great Books, but it wasn't until I'd finished university and come across Clifton Fadiman's Lifetime Reading Plan at the now defunct Book Den in Ottawa on MacLaren street, that I started to act seriously on the urge. It, and the 100 books recommended, had and continue to have a profound impact on my life. So, I was thrilled to learn tha...

David Frum is a staff writer at  The Atlantic  and the author of  Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic . In 2001 and 2002, he was a speechwriter for President George W. Bush.   We met in Ottawa and talked about, among other things, his father Murray, a Bernini bronze , African art, reference books, Linda Frum's biography of her (and David's), mother Barbara, the mistrust of optimis...

Stephen Greenblatt  is Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. He is the author of thirteen books, including  The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve;   The Swerve: How the World Became Modern; Shakespeare's Freedom; and Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare .  He is General Editor of  The Norton Anthology of English Literature  and of  The Norton Shakespeare,...

"Beowulf Sheehan studied photography at New York University and the International Center of Photography.  His childhood love of stories in books and music grew into an adulthood love of storytellers in the arts, entertainment, and humanities.  Beowulf makes portraits, communicates ideas, and shares the stories of  compelling artists and figures  who impact society and culture."  His book AUTHOR "c...

John Shoesmith is Outreach Librarian at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library in Toronto, and curator of the 2013 exhibition Death Greatly Exaggerated: Canada's Thriving Small and Fine Press which explored examples of the fine book-making craft in Canada since the year 2000 while nodding to Canada's small presses. We met at the Fisher and talked, among other things, about famed printer and book desi...

Lumiere Press is the private press of Michael Torosian . In the fine press tradition, the books are composed in lead, hand printed and hand bound. The press is devoted exclusively to photography, and each book aspires in its concept, graphic design, and bookmaking craftsmanship to be the manifestation of its artistic content. The shop's first printing press was acquired in 1981, and in 1986 the pu...

Michael Lista  is an investigative journalist, essayist and poet in Toronto. He has worked as a book columnist for  The National Post,  and as the poetry editor of  The Walrus . He is the author of three books: the poetry volumes  Bloom  and  The Scarborough,  and  Strike Anywhere ,  a collection of his writing about literature, television and culture. His essays and investigative stories have app...

Elaine Dewar  – author, journalist, television story editor—has been propelled since childhood by insatiable curiosity and the joy of storytelling. Her journalism has been honored by nine National Magazine awards, including the prestigious President's Medal, and the White Award. Her first book, Cloak of Green , delved into the dark side of environmental politics and became an underground classic. ...

Peggy L. Fox is the former president and publisher of New Directions, was Tennessee Williams's last editor, and is James Laughlin's literary coexecutor. She lives in Athens, New York, where we met to talk about, among other things, her career at New Directions, Tennessee Williams, the Chinese poet Bei Dao, Norfolk confetti, contacts and connections, James Laughlin's literary influence, letter writ...

Richard Minsky  is an American scholar of bookbinding and a book artist. He is the founder of the  Center for Book Arts  in New York City. We met in his studio in Hudson, NY to talk, among other things, about the proselytizing of book art, books as metaphors, the art of book covers, publishers' bindings, modernism, art history and the evolution of technology, Will Bradley, the acquisition of books...

Michel Tremblay was born in Montreal in 1942. He studied graphic arts and became a linotypist like his father and brother. He wrote his first play Le Train in 1959 and with it won the 1964 Radio Canada Young Author's Competition. But it was his second play Les Belles-Sœurs that established him as an important writer - the first play to use Joual and feature working class women on the stage, the fi...

Patrick deWitt was born on Vancouver Island in 1975. He has also lived in California, Washington, and Oregon, where he currently lives with his wife and son. He is the author of two novels, Ablutions and The Sisters Brothers , which won Canada's Governor General's Literary Award for fiction. Here's how the jury described it: "Brothers Eli and Charlie Sisters are at the centre of this "great greedy...

This from Simon and Schuster : " Anna Porter was born in Budapest, Hungary, during the Second World War and escaped with her mother at the end of the 1956 revolution to New Zealand, where she graduated with an MA from Christchurch University. Like so many young Kiwis, after graduation she travelled to London, England, where she had her first taste of publishing. In 1968, she arrived in Canada, and...

Ian S. MacNiven 's authorized biography of Lawrence Durrell was a New York Times Notable Book for 1998. He has edited two collections of Durrell's correspondence (with Richard Aldington and Henry Miller), is the author of numerous articles on literary modernism, and has directed and spoken at conferences on three continents. He is also a past president of the D. H. Lawrence Society of North Americ...

Adrian King Edwards is the proprietor of The Word Bookstore near McGill University in Montreal; has been for more than 40 years. I met with him at his home to talk books, second-hand versus used, the John Schulman scandal in Pittsburgh, trust, stories, longevity, authors' obscure childrens' books, policemen checking the spices, David McKnight's collection of Canadian literary periodicals, Canadian...

Through his work as a writer, editor, and photographer, Terence Byrnes came to know and to photograph many Montreal-based writers throughout their careers. "For ten years, he photographed them in places where they felt at home, but not always at ease. 'Most contemporary literary portraits,' Byrnes says, 'are as highly burnished as  Playboy  nudes or as homespun as family snapshots. When I made the...

Bill Samuel is the grandson of the founder of Foyles bookstore and was long-time Vice-Chairman of the company. Samantha J Rayner captures the spirit of the enterprise when she writes "[Foyles] emphasised that trial and error was an integral part of learning what makes for success. Foyles is not just a bookshop – they have tried all sorts of enterprises to generate more revenue: sheet music, musica...

Priscila Uppal, poet, author, and English professor at York University, challenges traditional psychological and anthropological models of mourning in her new book We Are What We Mourn: The Contemporary English-Canadian Elegy , suggesting that Canadians mourn differently. Traditional models define successful mourning in terms of detachment from the loved one who has died; the ability to cut the st...

Robert Lecker is a Canadian scholar, author, and Greenshields Professor of English at McGill University in Montreal, where he specializes in Canadian literature. He has held a number of prominent positions in the Canadian publishing industry throughout his career. He co-founded  ECW Press  in 1977, he co-edited the Canadian literary journal  Essays on Canadian Writing  between 1975 and 2004, he ha...

Hugh McGuire has been building tools and communities to bring books onto the open web since about 2005. He's the founder of  LibriVox.org  (free public domain audiobooks, made by volunteers from around the world),  Pressbooks  (an open source book publishing platform built on WordPress).  He's also Executive Director of the  Rebus Foundation , a non-profit that is building the infrastructure to su...

Series: Biblio File in France Kickshaws is a private press founded in Paris in 1979 by John Crombie, and Sheila Bourne who often produces artwork for the books. Together they have hand-printed more than 150 small books. The design, typography and materials used to create Kickshaws publications are unusual. As a result it's difficult to define exactly what they are. Among other things, they display...

Series: Biblio File in France Maylis Besserie is a French radio broadcaster. She works for France Culture , the French national cultural radio station of the Radio France group, where she has produced documentaries and live programming about cultural issues since 2003. Over the years she has interviewed many artists and authors. She currently produces a summer program called  la grande table d'été...

Series: Biblio File in France Krista Halverson is director of the newly founded  Shakespeare & Company publishing house  and editor of the first-ever history of the bookstore,  Shakespeare & Company, Paris: A History of the Rag & Bone Shop of the Heart . Previously, she was the managing editor of  Zoetrope: All-Story , a magazine of fiction and art, published by Francis Coppola and headquartered i...

Born in 1931, Jerome Rothenberg is an American poet, translator and anthologist, noted for his work in the fields of  ethnopoetics  and performance poetry.  This from Wikipedia:  Technicians of the Sacred  (1968), which signalled the beginning of an approach to poetry that Rothenberg, in collaboration with  George Quasha , named "ethnopoetics," went beyond the standard collection of folk songs to...