The Biblio File hosted by Nigel Beale

Margaret Atwood is a Canadian novelist, essayist, poet, teacher, environmental activist, and inventor. She has written plenty of books, many of them prize-winners. For example, she's won "two Booker Prizes (latest in 2019, co-winner, for The Testaments ), the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the Governor General's Award, the Franz Kafka Prize, Princess of Asturias Awards, and the National Book Critics and...

Hermione Lee was President of Wolfson College from 2008 to 2017 and is Emeritus Professor of English Literature in the English Faculty at Oxford University. She is a biographer and critic whose work includes biographies of Virginia Woolf (1996), Edith Wharton (2006) and Penelope Fitzgerald (2013, winner of the 2014 James Tait Black Prize for Biography and one of the New York Times best 10 books of...

"After working in computer systems analysis for a decade, John Burnside became a full-time writer in 1994. John has published 14 books of poetry, and has won the Geoffrey Faber Prize, the Whitbread Poetry Prize, the Petrarca Preis and, most recently, the Forward and T.S. Eliot Prizes for his poetry. He has also published eight novels and a memoir. He is Professor of English at the University of St...

Jaleen Grove is a Canadian artist and art historian whose area of focus is the history of illustration in the US and Canada. She  teaches at the Rhode Island School of Design, has written monographs on illustrators Oscar Cahén and Walter Haskell Hinton and has served as associate editor for the  Journal of Illustration . She is associate editor of the 592-page  History of Illustration (Bloomsbury,...

Steven Heller is an eminent American graphic designer, art director, art critic and scholar. ​  He  ​has  authored or​  co-authored  ​more than 200 ​ books which  variously trace​  the history of typography, illustration and other subjects related to graphic design. ​ I talk with Steve about Paul Rand an  American art director and graphic designer best known for his corporat ​e   designs which inc...

Daniel Mendelsohn "is an internationally bestselling author, critic, essayist, and translator. Born in New York City in 1960, he received degrees in Classics from the University of Virginia and Princeton. After completing his Ph. D. he moved to New York City, where he began freelance writing full time; since 1991 he has been a prolific contributor of essays, reviews, and articles to many publicati...

Fifteen years ago I interviewed Michael Cader at Book Expo in Toronto. The advice he had for publishers at the time remains remarkably fresh and valuable. Michael is the founder of Publisher's Lunch, the largest book publishing industry publication in the world. Each day it's e-mailed out to more than 45,000 people.  We talk about process, and transparency, extras, the role of a creative person, f...

William (Bill) Matthews has been dealing in old & rare books, manuscripts, maps and related material since 1976. He began working for a bookshop in Saskatoon, then opened his own in Vancouver in 1976, and subsequently moved to Toronto in 1980. He was in Ontario until 1996 when he moved to San Francisco / Berkeley and was part of Peter Howard's Serendipity Books for a few years. He's now the proud...

Don Stewart is the proprietor of MacLeod's Books at 455 West Pender Street in downtown Vancouver, a shop famed for its magnificent piles of books, wide selection and narrow aisles.  Stewart bought MacLeod's Books  in 1973 from Van Andruss   who ' d bought it from Don MacLeod a few years after it  opened in  1964 .  He moved the business into larger premises in 1981 only to see the place burn down...

Dr Falk Eisermann is head of the Incunabula Division at the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin and is considered a world expert in the field. He also heads the Gesamtkatalog der Wiegendrucke (Union catalogue of incunabula), GW for short. Founded in 1904 it's objective is to list all 15th-century items printed from movable type. Today the job is reportedly about fifty percent complete. Lots of work remains...

Dan Morgan is the proprietor of an antiquarian bookstore in Prague 6 that replicates the feel and function of a living room. Back in the 1990s Dan was invited by his future wife to visit Prague. He never left. In 2008 he 'got into' books thanks to a woman who sold them in his neighbourhood and who introduced him to Czech modernism and Samizdat. Coming full circle, by good fortune he was able recen...

Library exhibition catalogues, just like Bookseller catalogues, constitute a damned fine collecting area if you ask me. Beautiful, informative, and cheap - especially when you consider how much money and time, care and attention goes into producing them - they're well worth acquiring, despite not being particularly rare. What better service can I provide the collector to get a grip on this under-a...

Jordi Nadal was born in Barcelona in 1962 and holds a degree in Germanic Studies from the University of Barcelona. In 1998 he took the Stanford Professional Publishing Course and then began his career at Vicens Vives, later moving to Herder (Germany). He has been director of EDHASA, editorial and publications director of Círculo de Lectores, consultant at Random House in New York, general director...

For years Paul Delaney was professor of English at the University of Moncton; prior to this he taught at various institutions in London, England. During his lifetime he has had an ongoing interest in Acadian genealogy, a topic upon which he continues to publish and conduct research.     His biography of  Charles de Sousy Ricketts (1866-1931), published in 1990, was the first major study of a man w...

Andrew Coyne needs little introduction to Canadian audiences. He writes a weekly column for the Toronto Globe and Mail newspaper and is a member of the At Issue panel on CBC TV's The National newscast. He has previously been national editor of Maclean's magazine and a columnist for the National Post newspaper.    James Elliott Coyne (1910-2012) was a scholar, lawyer, public servant, family man, an...

Canada has an impressive tradition of producing great printer- publishers. Three of our best are Stan Bevington, Tim Inkster, and Andrew Steeves . Ancient interviews with all three can be found here on The Biblio File website.   The one with Andrew took place a dozen years ago so I figured it was time to clock another. I drove down to Kentville, Nova Scotia last month, where Andrew lives and works...

Michele K. Troy is professor of English at Hillyer College at the University of Hartford. She studies Anglo-American literary modernism in continental Europe and is the author of Strange Bird: The Albatross Press and the Third Reich , the first book to be written about the Albatross Press, a Penguin precursor, that entered into an uneasy relationship with the Nazi regime to keep Anglo-American lit...

Since 1972, Dr. Steven Lomazow has been building a collection of important American periodicals; it's now considered to be the most extensive in private hands. "The Steven Lomazow Collection of American Periodicals has been curated for the purpose of demonstrating the role of magazines as a reflection of all aspects American popular culture from pre-revolutionary times to the present day." Highlig...

On this episode of The Biblio File Book Club Heather O'Neill and I discuss one of her favourite novels, Agota Kristof's The Notebook .  This dark, fractured fairy tale of a story, told in simple, striking, visual language, describes the devastating impact of war on children and their families. Set in an unknown country during wartime it follows the lives of twin boys coping with life after they've...

Aimee Peake has been active in the antiquarian book business in Winnipeg for more than 20 years. She got her start as an apprentice to Michael Park, proprietor Greenfield Books. In 2000 she took over as manager of the newly-opened Bison Books, assuming sole proprietorship in 2010. In 2018 she purchased Greenfield and amalgamated it with Bison. You'll usually find Aimee in her bookshop on weekdays...

Jack David launched the publishing house ECW in 1974 as the journal Essays on Canadian Writing - from which came the E, the C, and the W. For the next ten years the company focused on scholarly projects and occasionally dabbled in more accessible trade books and biographies. The breakthrough came when it decided in the early 90s to publish books about non-literary folk, the key title being a biogr...

Dr. Stephen Enniss is Director of the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin . He has held previous appointments at the Folger Shakespeare Library and at Emory University's Rare Book Library. His research interests are in 20th century poetry, and he has written on Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, and Seamus Heaney, among others. He is the author of After the Titanic: A Life of Derek Mah...

Meghan Constantinou has been Head Librarian at The Grolier Club since 2011 and a Club member since 2013. Her research interests include the history of private collecting, women's book ownership, and provenance studies. The Club Library collects, preserves, and makes accessible materials dedicated to the history and art of the book. Strengths of its collection include bibliographies, histories of p...

One of the best ways to become a successful, fulfilled antiquarian bookseller is to establish close, long-lasting relationships with enthusiastic, committed, ideally well-heeled, collectors. Justin Schiller is a pioneer in the field of rare, collectible children's books. During his career he has developed extraordinary bonds with many passionate book lovers. His efforts over the years with several...

Walter Lockhart Gordon (1906 – 1987) was a Canadian accountant, businessman, politician, and economic nationalist. Born in Toronto, he was educated at Upper Canada College and the Royal Military College of Canada in Kingston, Ontario. Upon graduation he joined the family accounting firm of Clarkson, Gordon and Company. During World War II he served in the Bank of Canada and the federal Ministry of...