The Biblio File hosted by Nigel Beale

Martin Latham has been a bookseller for thirty-five years. He has a PhD in Indian history, and taught at Hertfordshire University before turning to bookselling. He is proud to be responsible for the biggest petty-cash claim in Waterstones' history, when he paid for the excavation of a Roman bath-house floor under his bookshop. Martin's books include Kent's Strangest Tales, Londonopolis , and most...

The Bookshelf bookshop in Guelph, Ontario was established in 1973 by Barb and Doug Minett . In 1980 it became The Bookshelf Cafe - Canada's first bookstore cafe/restaurant. Shortly thereafter an ambitious plan was conceived to add a cinema and bar to what was then the roof of the building. During implementation, University of Guelph physics professor and longtime customer, Jim Hunt, trained a team...

It was on Twitter a couple of months ago that I noticed this tweet celebrating the work of one Bianca Gillam (@BinxGillam). 'You're the best special sales assistant ever', it said, or words to that effect. Hmm I thought. What, I wonder, does a special sales assistant do at a publishing house - I'd noticed that she worked at Simon & Schuster ( @simonschusterUK ). I wasn't sure. So I tweeted at Bian...

Last year at about this time David Gilmour and I sat down together to talk about " Mojave " one of Truman Capote's greatest short stories. We enjoyed ourselves so much we decided to do it again, this time with " Shut a Final Door ."  Capote wrote this story when he was only 23 years old. David contends that it strongly foreshadows how Truman's actual life would unfold - as a slow, messy descent in...

Virago is a London-based British publishing company committed to publishing women's writing and books on "feminist" topics.  Established by women in the 1970s in tandem with the Women's Liberation Movement (WLM), Virago has done much to address inequitable gender dynamics in the publishing world, and, unlike anti-capitalist publishing ventures, has branded itself a commercial alternative in a male...

Martin Amis was born in Oxford in 1949 and is a British novelist, essayist, and memoirist - all of whom show up to contribute to his latest novel, Inside Story.     As it happens I read  Lolita in tandem with Inside Story , so the front-end of our conversation is laden with nasty Nabokovian-related questions. Since Vladimir, along with Saul Bellow, has heavily influenced Martin's writing over the...

" Martin Parr 's celebrated photographs bridge the divide between art and documentary photography. His studies of the idiosyncrasies of mass culture and consumerism around the world, his innovative imagery, and his prolific output have placed him firmly at the forefront of contemporary art. He is an avid collector and maker of photobooks. His own photobooks include The Last Resort (1986), Common S...

...in which I posit that raising funds is a primary motivator explaining why scientists write, and Lawrence disagrees; and the two of us argue over the similarities and differences between art and science... The combatants tend to confuse human-made with nature-made art, and possibly don't even actually disagree, if we're talking big picture. Anyway, the conversation is lively, if nothing else. Th...

Patrick McGahern has been operating an antiquarian bookshop in Ottawa, Canada's capital, since 1969. Today it continues to thrive under the management of Patrick's son Liam. The store specializes in Used and Rare Books, Canadiana, Americana, Arctic, Antarctic, Travel, Natural History & Voyages, Illustrated & Plate Books, Rare Books, Irish and Scottish History and Literature. I met Patrick via Zoom...

Roger Chartier ​ was  born ​ in  1945 in Lyon, ​France. He is a giant in the field of  ​ book ​ history   ​and the study of ​ publishing and reading. ​ He teaches at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, the Collège de France, and the University of Pennsylvania. ​ ​ I interviewed Roger via Zoom in hopes of determining exactly why he's a giant, who's shoulders he stands on, and...

Toby Faber grew up with Faber & Faber - its books and stories have played an important role in his life. He was the company's managing director for four years and remains a non-executive director and chairman of sister company Faber Music. He has written two celebrated works of non-fiction, Stradivarius and Fabergé 's Eggs . His first novel, Close to the Edge , was published by Muswell Press in 20...

Powell's Books is a chain of bookstores located in and around Portland, Oregon. It claims to be the largest independent new and used bookstore in the world. Powell's 'City of Books' store is located on the edge of downtown and occupies a full city block. It covers some 68,000 square feet or 1.6 acres of retail floor space. Emily Powell is a third generation owner of the bookstore. She made headlin...

Tiphaine Guillermou is an editor with Graphéine , a design agency with offices in Paris and Lyon.  While researching 20th century French book design - so that I'd have some books to hunt down while visiting bookstores in France - I came across a terrific article Tiphaine had written for Graphéine 's blog, here . It was exactly what I was looking for - filled with all sorts of great book collecting...

Andy Hunter is the founder and CEO of Bookshop.org   He's also the publisher at Catapult , at Counterpoint and at Softskull , and, as if this isn't enough, publisher and co-creator at LitHub , and co-founder and chairman at Electric Literature .    Despite all of these responsibilities, Andy took the time to talk via Zoom about his latest venture and how to use it to help support indie bookstores,...

Benoit Forgeot is one of France's leading antiquarian book dealers. We met in his office, in the Odeon district of Paris to talk about what differentiates French collectors from American; French book binders; secrets; coffee; the manuscript market ( good time to buy); Paul Bonet , coffee again; business in Paris versus the provinces; the crucial knowledge that American curators impart, and much mo...

Anne-Solange Noble has been International Rights Manager at Gallimard since 1992. She was born and raised in Montreal, Canada and graduated from McGill University in Hispanic Literature. After spending two years in Mexico she went to Paris where she studied International Relations at the Institut d'Études Politiques de Paris. In 1985 she landed a job in rights negotiations with Flammarion. Seven y...

Lifted from Bill Samuel 's website : Itinerant one-time chartered accountant who has lived in Denmark, East Africa, the Gulf (Arabian/Persian, not Texan) and the Caribbean with shorter stints in Eastern Europe and various rather nice small islands. Born in England into a family with an international outlook, an interest in people and a feeling for the cultural side of life. William Foyle, one of t...

John Freeman is an American writer and a literary critic. He was the editor of Granta from 2009 to 2013, and is a former president of the National Book Critics Circle . His writing has appeared in more than 200 English-language publications around the world and he currently edits a series of anthologies of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry entitled Freeman's, published in partnership with Grove/Atla...

Kenneth White is the founder of Sutherland House Books . He is the former editor-in-chief of Saturday Night Magazine , the founding editor of  The National Post , and the former editor and publisher of  Maclean's  magazine. He was president of Rogers Publishing, Canada's largest magazine company, and the founding president of Next Issue Canada (now Texture), in partnership with Conde Nast, Meredit...

Jael Richardson is the author of The Stone Thrower: A Daughter's Lesson, a Father's Life , a memoir exploring her relationship with her father, CFL quarterback Chuck Ealey. It was adapted into a children's book in 2016. Richardson is a book columnist and guest host on CBC's q . She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph and lives in Brampton, Ontario where she founded and s...

Pierre Assouline is a French writer and journalist. He was born in Casablanca, Morocco and has published several novels. He has written biographies of, among others, the legendary photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson; Hergé, the creator of The Adventures of Tintin ; Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, the art dealer, and Georges Simenon, the detective novelist and creator of Inspector Maigret.  As a journalist...

After graduating from university in 2005 Maylis Besserie began  teaching documentary production at the Institute of Communications and Media in Paris , and joined France Culture as a radio producer and host . In February 2020 she published her first novel, Le Tiers Temps ( Gallimard ) . It evokes the last days of  Samuel Beckett in a Parisian retirement home . The protagonist, while describing his...

'Barnet Lee "Barney" Rosset, Jr. (1922 – 2012) was owner of the  Grove Press publishing house and publisher and editor-in-chief at the Evergreen Review . He led a successful legal battle to publish the uncensored version of D. H. Lawrence's novel Lady Chatterley's Lover , and later was the American publisher of Henry Miller's controversial novel Tropic of Cancer . The right to publish and distribu...

Jacques Shore is a partner in Gowling WLG's Ottawa office, a member of the firm's Advocacy Group, and past leader of the firm's Government Affairs Group. ​ He has acted as lead negotiator on many business and government-related initiatives and  has worked actively on behalf of the federal government of Canada and provincial governments on a broad range of legal and public policy matters ​, includi...

Richard Nash is a coach, strategist, and serial entrepreneur. He led partnerships and content at the culture discovery start-up  Small Demons and the new media app Byliner. Previously he ran independent publishers Soft Skull (not Skill) Press and Red Lemonade where he published Maggie Nelson, Lynne Tillman, Vanessa Veselka's Zazen , Alain Mabanckou, and many others, for which work he was awarded t...