The Biblio File hosted by Nigel Beale

I met with famed Czech writer/novelist Ivan Klima at his home in Prague to  talk about his memoir My Crazy Century . Topics covered include the criminal conspiracy of communism, the impact on his life of the Terazin concentration camp, the thrill of freedom, forests, poisonous mushrooms, communist stupidity and lack of common sense, Potemkin villages, political apathy, great literature describing...

Guy Baxter has been University Archivist at University of Reading since 2008. His responsibilities include caring for the Archive of British Publishing and Printing , the archives of the Museum of English Rural Life, and the Beckett Collection. Guy has worked in museum archives for over 15 years and has advised on several major research projects including Staging Beckett (AHRC), Giving Voice to th...

Historian John Cole started working at the Library of Congress as a young man in 1966. Most of his books since have dealt with this venerable institution. We talk here about it's influence on American political and cultural life, about Thomas Jefferson as bibliophile, about books comprising a small part of the library's total collection; capturing, cataloging and digitizing the world's intellectua...

Stephan Delbos is a New England-born writer living in Prague, where he teaches at Anglo-American University and Charles University. His poetry, essays and translations have appeared internationally in journals such as Absinthe, Agni, Oxonian Review, PEN America, and Zoland Poetry. He is the editor of From a Terrace in Prague: A Prague Poetry Anthology (Litteraria Pragensia, 2011). A collection of...

Series: Biblio File in France Better known for its wines, the perfection of its local spoken French, it's cathedral and chateau, the city of Tours France also has a surprisingly rich historical connection with printing and typography. I was in Tours recently and visited the  Musee de la Typographie . It may be small, but it's full of all sorts of different kinds of old printing equipment and tools...

I interviewed Lauren Elkin about her new book Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London at her apartment in the Belleville neighbourhood of Paris. Stepping off a rather ordinary, noisy street through a large pair of solid French (!) doors, I encountered a lovely, quiet, tree-lined pathway/courtyard en route to "an airy, comfortable writer's home, filled with books...

Yes, the background voices are distracting, but what do you expect, we're in a Welsh pub for crying out loud! Well, actually we're upstairs at the Dylan Thomas Centr e in Swansea at a bar surrounded by revellers who have just attended a hilarious poetry vs burlesque mashup down the hallway in the Centre's theatre. So everyone is pretty frisky. The performance kicked off the annual Dylan Thomas Fes...

Wikipedia tells us that "Thomas Bewick (1753 – 1828) was an English engraver and  author. Early in his career he took on all kinds of work such as engraving , making the wood blocks for advertisements, and illustrating children's books. He gradually turned to illustrating, writing and publishing his own books, gaining an adult audience for the fine illustrations in A History of Quadrupeds . His ca...

Gaylord Schanilec is an American wood engraver , printer , designer and illustrator. He is the proprietor of  Midnight Paper Sales press. Schanilec has "set the standard for contemporary artist's books over the last 30 years." His highly collected and unique fine press books explore his interests and experiences as well as his hometown Wisconsin landscape and community. From farming culture and th...

David Esslemont is an artist, designer, printmaker and bookbinder. He makes books from scratch, most recently about food, and publishes under his  Solmentes Press imprint. He was Artistic Director of the University of Wales Gregynog Press from 1985–97 and has won many book design awards including the Felice Feliciano International Award in 1991. Esslemont's work can be found in both private and pu...

In which I talk, in rather rushed fashion, to great Canadian author and "bad" feminist Margaret Atwood about literary tourism: 'place' and her novel MaddAddam , Harvard and The Handmaid's Tale , and the Kingston Penitentiary and Alias Grace , also the real and the imaginary, the unreliability of eye witnesses, following the research, Samuel Johnson, Ernest Hemingway, food and underclothing, bodies...

November 30, 2017 marked the 350th anniversary of the birth of one the world's great satirists, Jonathan Swift. To honour the occasion I thought it would be fitting to interview an expert on humour, in this, the age of Trump. So I met recently with Maggie Hennefeld, Assistant Professor of Cultural Studies & Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota, in Minneapolis. We discuss her artic...

Scott Griffin, (born 1938) is a Canadian businessman and philanthropist best known for founding the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2000, one of the world's most generous poetry awards, and 'Poetry In Voice', a bilingual recitation competition for Canadian high schools.  Griffin is chairman, director and majority shareholder since 2002 of House of Anansi Press/Groundwood Books, and Chancellor of Bishop's...

I met with publisher Simon Dardick at his home office in Montreal to talk about the history and collecting of his long-running literary publishing house  Vehicule Press . 

Glenn Dixon has published two books.  Pi lgrim in the Palace of Words : A journey through the 6000 languages of Earth  was published in 2009 to rave reviews.  His second,  Tripping the World Fantastic: A journey through the music of our planet  came out in April of 2013.  He has also published travel articles and cultural pieces in major publications such as National Geographic Magazine, the New Y...

Marcello Di Cintio is a Canadian writer. He won the 2012 Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing for his book  Walls: Travels Along the Barricades.  The award was handed out on March 6, 2013 at the Writers' Trust of Canada's annual Politics and the Pen in Ottawa. Marcello was born in Calgary, Alberta where he currently lives with his wife, Moonira, and son, Amedeo. We met recently to discuss...

Rae Armantrout is an American poet generally associated with Language Poets. Armantrout was born in Vallejo, California but grew up in San Diego. She has published more than 10 books of poetry and has also been featured in a number of major anthologies. Armantrout teaches at the University of California, San Diego, where she is Professor of Poetry and Poetics. Armantrout was awarded the 2009 Natio...

The Press & Letterfoundry of Michael & Winifred Bixler is "devoted to the craft of fine letterpress printing and traditional book typography. Our extensive collection of English Monotype matrices allows us to cast from 8- to 72-point, classic book typefaces including Bembo, Dante, Walbaum, Van Dijck, Joanna, Perpetua, Garamond, Centaur & Arrighi, Ehrhardt, Fournier, Bell, Baskerville, Poliphilus,...

I met with David Mason in Kingston to talk about his memoir The Pope's Bookbinder . As the Biblioasis website wordsmiths have it: "From his drug-hazy, book-happy years near the Beat Hotel in Paris and throughout his career as antiquarian book dealer, David Mason brings us a storied life. He discovers his love of literature in a bathtub at age eleven, thumbing through stacks of lurid Signet paperba...

Matthew Tree  (born December 30, 1958) is a writer in English and Catalan. He has lived in  Barcelona  since 1984. Apart from publishing both fiction and non-fiction, he is a contributor to various newspapers and magazines such as Catalonia Today, The Times Literary Supplement , Barcelona INK,  Altaïr , El Punt Avui and L'Esguard. He has also appeared on various Catalan language radio and TV stati...

George Tremlett  (born 1939) is an English author, bookshop owner, and former politician. According to his own biography, after leaving King Edward VI School Stratford-upon-Avon, he worked for the Coventry Evening Telegraph from 1957 onward as a TV columnist and pop music reviewer. In 1961 he became a freelance rock journalist and in the 1970s wrote a series of paperbacks on pop stars, including ...

Wales celebrated the centenary of famed Welsh poet  Dylan Thomas in 2014 .  Annie Haden  is an experienced tourist guide and a specialist in the life of Thomas. With over 20 years experience in the tourism sector, Anne uses an easy listening story-telling technique which keeps her tours both interesting and informative. I caught up with her at Morgans hotel in Swansea, Thomas's home town, to talk...

I met with Andre Alexis to discuss  his novella,  A  (BookThug, 2013). During our conversation we hit, among other things, on literary criticism, book reviewing, 'Good' and 'Baddeley' literary critics, and David Gilmour and his GG Award winning novel  A Perfect Night to go to China , and Alexis's contention that racism is contained in the chapter in this novel entitled "The Pigeon".   Please note...

Alberto Manguel is an Argentine-born writer, translator, and editor, and the author of  many books of both non-fiction, including   A History of Reading  (1996),  The Library at Night  (2007) and Homer's Iliad and Odyssey: A Biography  (2008); and fiction (  News From a Foreign Country Came  , 1991). We met at the Kingston WritersFest; I asked him to recount some of his favourite experiences in bo...

Herman Melville lived at Arrowhead (so named because of arrowheads found nearby during planting season) from 1850–1863, during which time he wrote some of his best known works:  Moby-Dick,  The Confidence-Man, and The Piazza Tales, a short story collection named after his porch, of which he wrote: Now, for a house, so situated in such a country, to have no piazza for the convenience of those who m...