The Biblio File hosted by Nigel Beale

I've long been interested in rhetoric, the techniques of persuasive argument, propaganda; the use of passionate language. It's why I collect publishers' sales and bookseller catalogues, I'm sure!    Ever since first laying hands on the bookseller catalogues that Jerry Kelly has, over the years, designed for the likes of Jonathan A. Hill and Glenn Horowitz, I've held the conviction that he is one o...

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...

Scott R Ferris , is a  researcher, writer and specialist in the art of Rockwell Kent (1882-1971). He has conducted many lectures on Kent and has served as curator for a lot of Kent exhibitions.   Here's a thumbnail of Kent culled from what Zoë Samels has written on the U.S. National Gallery website:   He attended the Horace Mann School in New York City where he excelled at mechanical drawing. Afte...

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...

​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...

A perceptive devotee of the podcast told me last week that he thought I was an ignoramus.      'You don't think it takes talent to be a photographer (referring to something said during this conversation with Michael Torosian, maker of fine press photography books, here )?'   'I do think it takes talent,' I responded. 'I just don't know how much. The case hasn't been made very well I don't think fo...

Here is Part ll of my conversation with Michael Torosian featuring his soon to be released memoir/bibliography Lumiere Press: Printer Savant and Other Stories (listen to Part l here ) .   This episode gets to the essence of Michael's book writing/publishing practice: the interview. We discuss a list of guidelines Michael has developed based on his experience interviewing some of greatest photograp...

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 illuminating each...

John Metcalf  is angry that after working in Canada as a "storyteller, editor, novelist, essayist, and critic" for more than fifty years his books still only sell about 500 copies each. Regardless of this, he's made a significant contribution to Canadian literature through his editing, teaching, critiquing, compiling of anthologies, publishing, and promotion generally of Canadian writers and the s...

In an email I received several months ago, the owners of the iconic Washington, D.C. based independent bookstore Politics & Prose wrote that Mark LaFramboise, their chief book buyer, had died. "Mark was the best book buyer any independent bookstore could hope for," Brad Graham and Lissa Muscatine said in their note. "Not only did he know books; he knew P&P's customers, who gravitated to him becaus...

  Tom Devlin is a key figure in the world of graphic novels. His career mimics the evolution of the genre. As founder of Highwater Books, a publishing house he set up in the early 2000s, he treated alternative comics audiences in North America to their first book-length exposure to future star cartoonist/authors John Porcellino, Marc Bell, Ron Rege Jr., Brian Ralph and others - many of whom subseq...

Shannon DeVito is Barnes and Noble 's 'Director of Books.' We met via Zoom to discuss the roles and duties associated with this intriguing-sounding position. I discovered that they include co-ordinating the relationship between national and local book-buying teams; 'assortment' work; creating initiatives - including prizes ( e.g. the Discover Prize; most recent winner: The Rabbit Hutch , a debut n...

Where does editing leave off and ghostwriting begin? How cool is it to pass yourself off as the writer if you haven't done any of the writing? How much recognition do "collaborators" deserve? Should ghostwriters be completely anonymous? When should they refuse assignments? How does one work with a person whose views are opposed to yours? Where does craft end and art take over? What explains a succ...

Earlier this year a tiny Quebec-based children's publishing house, Monsieur Ed , won the prize for Best Children's Publishers of the Year in North America at the Bologna Book Fair. It won, judges said, for being at the forefront of innovation in the creative nature of its editorial choices during the past year. I thought this was a big deal so I contacted publisher and creative director Valérie Pi...

Allan Fleming  (1929 – 1977) was a Canadian graphic designer best known for having created the Canadian National Railway logo, for designing the 1967 book Canada: A Year of the Land and for "revolutionizing" the look of scholarly publishing in North America in the 1970s with his work at University of Toronto Press.   In 1953 Allan moved to England to work as a graphic designer, and to learn about...

I first became aware of the graphic edition of Timothy Snyder's book  On Tyranny  during a visit to the National Socialist Documentation Centre museum in Munich about a year ago (revel in the backstory here ). I bought and read a copy of the original edition shortly thereafter. It's a powerful book, full of important, actionable lessons. This past Summer I picked up a copy of Nora Krug 's illustra...

Libri Prohibiti is a nonprofit, independent, archival research library located in Prague, Czech Republic that collects samizdat and exile literature. Founded by Jiri Gruntorad after the fall of the communist regime its holdings include some 40,000 monographs, periodicals, reference resources, and audiovisual materials. In addition to dissident articles, many popular books were banned, and subseque...

Naomi Bacon is a seasoned book marketer, and founder of The Tandem Collective. She has worked with JK Rowling's agency, The Blair Partnership, as well as Pottermore, Pan Macmillan, Penguin and Hachette. Her ambition has always been "to be at the forefront of digital innovation, creating meaningful connections between publishing partners, content creators and brands to generate word of mouth around...

Michael Žantovský is a Czech diplomat, author and translator. He is a former Czech Ambassador to the United Kingdom, as well as to Israel and the United States. He has translated more than fifty works of fiction, drama and poetry, mostly by contemporary American and British writers including James Baldwin, Norman Mailer, Joseph Heller, E.L. Doctorow, and Tom Stoppard. Non-fiction translations incl...

John Owen is a bookseller who runs the events program at the English Bookshop at Dussmann das KulturKaufhaus in Berlin. That English Bookshop? Probably the best I've ever been in, in my life.   We talk about, among other things: being blown away; bookshop lighting; window seating; how to display books; mixing things up and discovering new titles; bookshops as cultural institutions; Sally Rooney; s...

Elisabeth Ruge is a German editor, publisher and literary agent. She currently heads the Elisabeth Ruge Agency which she founded in 2014. In 1994 she established the Berlin Verlag publishing house together with her then husband Arnulf Conradi and Veit Heinichen.    I met Elisabeth at her home on the outskirts of Berlin to discuss the roles she has played over her career, including the one she curr...

Jonathan Landgrebe  is the publisher of Suhrkamp Verlag. We met at his offices in Berlin to talk about his role as head of one of Germany's most revered publishing houses, and to riff off Siegfried Unseld's book The Author and His Publisher. Topics covered in our conversation include: important books that just don't sell; the publisher-author relationship; books that change both readers and the wo...

Pamela  Paul was books editor at the New York Times from 2013 to March 2022 when she became an opinion columnist for the newspaper.    We talk mostly about the role that books editors play in the lifecycle of 'the book.' I also whine a fair amount about how I don't like the fact that she left her position plus we diverge into discussion about Pamela 's recent opinion piece 'There's More Than One W...

Why listen to James Marsh ? Because he knows about love and encyclopedias.    He grew up in The Junction district of Toronto surviving a difficult childhood, and began his career in publishing at Holt Rinehart and Winston where he was editor of a Centennial history of Canada entitled Unity and Diversity. He later became executive editor of McClelland and Stewart's Carleton Library Series , after w...

Nick Anthony is a writer, stand-up comic, and screen-writer. He's participating in this year's Prague Summer Program for Writers and his novel, tentatively entitled Two Hits of Acid in Cambodia , was just workshopped this past week. We talk about the experience, but not before discussing magic, stand-up comedy writing; new material that kills; God complexes; screen-writing; Tarantino's Django Unch...