THE BIBLIO FILE is one of the world's leading podcasts about "the book" and an inquiry into the wider world of book culture. Hosted by Nigel Beale it features wide ranging conversations with authors, poets, book publishers, booksellers, book editors, book collectors, book makers, book scholars, book critics, book designers, book publicists, literary agents and other certified bibliophiles.
B. Traven's novels and stories have sold more than 30 million copies over the past century in more than 30 languages worldwide. He was Einstein's favourite novelist. Der Spiegel ranks his The Death Ship as the third greatest German novel ever written (okay in the past 100 years), after Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, and Kafka's The Castle; and yet, despite this, few today, in the English speaking world at least, have heard of him. It's only thanks to the movie, The Treasure of Sierra Madre, based on one of his stories, that he's known here at all. Why is this? Perhaps because no-one knows with absolute certainty who Traven was. No-one is 100% sure of his true identity. Timothy Heyman (CBE) is 99% sure. We talk here about his hypothesis, plus the tasks he's set himself to re-establish Traven's reputation and re-gain an audience for his works. Heyman, a considerable person in his own right, is co-manager (recently promoted to managing director) of the B. Traven Estate along with his wife (who is proprietor), Malú Montes de Oca de Heyman, Traven's stepdaughter. I met Tim up in the couple's beautiful apartment overlooking Mexico City to talk about what he's achieved to date with Traven's literary archive, and, again, who he thinks Traven really was. We were surrounded by a library of books written by the mystery man, accompanied by a glorious panoramic view of the city. After our conversation we went upstairs to a special room which holds the archive - the place where Tim occupies himself with the business of legacy building.
Some years ago I interviewed David McKnight about a collection of Canadian “little magazines” he'd hunted down and later donated to the University of Alberta's Bruce Peel Library. It was very easy to get caught up in David's enthusiasm, and I was really impressed by the catalogue he'd produced. Shortly after our conversation I learned that he didn't just collect Canadian poetry, he was also a serious Beatles collector. We stayed in touch. I drove down to Philadelphia where David hosted me at his home for a weekend. We got a lot done. Took the train into New York for the opening of a film about a bookseller; went on a tour of the rare book and manuscript library at the University of Pennsylvania where David worked at the time as director; attended the Allentown Paper Fair where I picked up some old Fortune and New York Times magazines. It was great. A non-stop exchanging of excited thoughts about books, collecting, and cool periodicals. Share I've been wanting to interview David about The Fab Four ever since I learned of his passion. He's a real expert on the band. I was particularly keen to find out about his personal relationship to the music, and of course, about his experience collecting and documenting its impact on print culture, internationally, high and low. Finally, after years of talking about it, we got down to business. The albums, the books - from limited editions to paperbacks - the magazines, the fan zines, the ephemera, the scrap-books, the puzzles. Liverpool. It's all here.
Michael Erdman is Head of Middle East and Central Asian Collections at The British Library with overall responsibility for all manuscript holdings in Arabic, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Chagatai, Coptic, Hebrew, Kurdish, Ottoman Turkish, Persian, and Syriac. I talked with him about my recent magazine hunting exploits in Istanbul, and how what we found fits into the overall history of magazine publishing in Turkey. Esoteric, I know, but hey, this is where passion takes you.
I first came across Andrés Mario Zervigón's (Cuban) name while researching a magazine that filled me with awe the first time I saw it. AIZ, the Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung (Workers Illustrated Magazine) is an illustrated, mass circulation German periodical that was published in Berlin during the 1920s and 1930s (in Prague after 1933). It contains some of the most emotionally charged imagery I've ever seen. The best work was by John Heartfield. Zervigón is professor of the history of photography at Rutgers University in New Jersey. He obtained his PhD from Harvard University in 2000 and concentrates his scholarship “on the interaction between photographs, film, and fine art." His first book, John Heartfield and the Agitated Image: Photography, Persuasion, and the Rise of Avant-Garde Photomontage (University of Chicago Press, 2012), proposes that “photography's sudden ubiquity in illustrated magazines, postcards, and posters produced an unsettling transformation of visual culture that artists felt compelled to address.” Zervigón's work, says the Rutger's website, “generally focuses upon moments in history when these media [film, photography, fine art] prove inadequate to their presumed task of representing the visual.” We start our conversation by unpacking this passage, and then move on to a short history of illustrated, mass circulation magazines, (including VU magazine), then to the life of John Heartfield, and finally to AIZ. Background here
Tony Fekete is a book collector who for years specialized in collecting erotica. He's best known for the catalogue he produced for a Christie's auction that took place in 2014 that featured highlights from his collection. More than 200 books, manuscripts, lithographs and erotic photographs went up for sale, including a first edition of My Secret Life (1888), an eleven-volume memoir that describes in detail the sex life of an anonymous Victorian "Gentleman," of which only twenty-five copies were printed. The auction netted Fekete more than a million pounds. Tony is a mobile bibliophile who travels frequently, primarily by train, in pursuit of books. Born in London in 1954 of Hungarian descent, he worked for Citibank in Eastern Europe during the mid-1980s where he cultivated both his love of books and an appreciation for the region. Today he shares these passions on Instagram and Facebook, posting photographs of his journeysthroughout Eastern Europe, that feature old bars and restaurants that he favours and, of course, highlights from his still significant (and stimulating) erotica collection. I spoke with him via Zoom.
Siegfried Lokatis is a retired professor of book history, and former head of the University of Leipzig's Institute for Communication and Media Studies. He is the author of Book Covers of the GDR and is currently working on a history of the S. Fischer publishing house, due out in 2026. We met in Leipzig recently where Siegfried treated me to a tour of the Bibliotop's splendid Insel Bucherei book collection. Founded in 1912, the series now contains some 2,000 titles (and still counting according to Jonathan Landgrebe, head of Suhrkamp Verlag, the company that today produces the books). The series is iconic in Germany and in many ways its publishing history reflects the history of the country. The books are known for their beauty and the care with which they're produced. Qualities include: individual typographical design, exquisite illustration (notably from the thirties - stay tuned) and photography, and printing on wood-free, age-resistant paper, plus they're thread-stitched and bound in decorative cover paper. They served as the model for Allen Lane's King Penguin series. The Insel Bucherie series includes both well-known and little known texts from world literature as well as art history, non-fiction, poetry, and fairy tales, plus gift anthologies from Germany and around the globe. Subjects covered in my conversation with Siegfried include Rilke and copyright, the decision to publish established, versus contemporary works; Stephan Zweig and the Nazis, poisonous mushrooms, the rarest volume, the Allied bombing of Leipzig, censorship, the separation of East and West Germany, wartime profits, collecting, pornography and more.
Richard Charkin has held senior posts at many major, and some minor, publishing houses in the U.K. over the past 50 years, including: Harrap, OUP, Pergamon Press, Reed Elsevier, Macmillan, Bloomsbury, and Mensch Publishing. He is former President of The Book Society, the International Publishers Association and the UK Publishers Association. His book My Back Pages, An Undeniably Personal History of Publishing 1972-2022 came out in 2023. The book has sold more than 3,000 copies, and is being translated into four languages. It took me a year to figure out what questions to ask him. Just so you know, Richard has been very good to The Biblio File podcast over the years. Thanks to him I've landed all sorts of great publishing guests. And John Banville! I'm grateful to him for this, and for his being so generous with his time and knowledge, sharing them as he has with me on multiple occasions during episodes that have dealt with, among other things, great publishers, the challenges facing the book business, and how to set up a small publishing house. I wrote this about him a while back: Richard does what all great publishers do. He pays attention to what's going on both in the world, and in the world of books. He pays attention to what people are doing and reaches out to them to learn more. He takes an interest. It's pretty simple. And pretty important. He also lets people know what he's up to. I got to know him through his blog. It gave me a wonderful glimpse into the daily life of a high-powered publisher - the workings of business, but also the workings of his mind, and occasionally his emotions… His writing invited and welcomed a human response. I'm happy to have been able to re-connect with Richard again recently, this time via Zoom, to talk about the changes he's seen, and lessons he's learned, over more than 50 years in the book publishing business, something, more than incidentally, that he's been rewarded for recently in the form of an OBE. It's good to see that his exemplary work in, and on behalf of, the publishing business - his “service to literature,” has been recognized.
The last time I ran into renowned book scholar Jonathan Rose (at a SHARP conference) he mentioned that he was doing some work on Playboy magazine. ‘Way more women readers than you'd expect!' he told me. Rose is an accomplished author. His groundbreaking and award-winning book, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, first published in 2001, is selling in its third edition and has been translated into multiple languages. I emailed him recently. He directed me to a paper he'd delivered entitled Readers, Magazines, Playboy, Market Research: The Daniel Starch Reports as Tools for Reading Research, I read it and teed up this conversation on Zoom. Subjects covered include Daniel Starch and his Starch Reports, Soviet readership reports, Stephen Hawking, Woody Allen, free speech, Skyhorse Publishing, gay rights, Hugh Hefner, art director Art Paul, missionaries, free enterprise, Cosmopolitan Magazine, airbrushing, pornography, conventional wisdom, myths, George Orwell and populism Enjoy!
Karen Etingin is the proprietor of L'Affichiste, a vintage poster shop in Montreal. Here's the scoop: "Working with private, corporate and institutional clients, L'Affichiste deals in vintage posters on a global level. The gallery provides evaluations of private, corporate and museum collections of posters, and is a member of the internationally recognized International Vintage Poster Dealer Association." Karen is the author of Beyond Poster Art in Vienna: The Life and Art of Julius Klinger We met recently via Zoom to talk about her love and passion for posters, and her experience collecting and selling them.
Michael Lista is an investigative journalist, essayist and poet who lives in Toronto. I've followed his career now for some fifteen years. He's written true crime for the better part of a decade. His story “The Sting” is being adapted by Adam Perlman, Robert Downey Jr., and Team Downey, into a television series for Apple TV+. We talk here about Michael's recent book of true crime stories, The Human Scale; about Truman Capote and the non-fiction novel; about listening and details; being honest when talking with people who've experienced crises, and how tawdry it is to ask for exclusivity; about examining systems, and how tardy the delivery of justice can sometimes be; about how the story resides in the telling, and how Shakespeare stuck his landings; about in extremis and understanding who we really are; fact-checked fairy tales; competing against YouTube and Netflix; and much more.
Boris Wertz joined AbeBooks.com "the world's largest Internet marketplace for books" in July 2002 after JustBooks, a similar company he'd co-founded in Germany, was acquired by the ABE. This interview took place in 2006. After five years as COO of AbeBooks.com Wertz transitioned out of his day-to-day operational role, in 2007, to start a Vancouver-based venture capital business with Burda Digital Ventures. ABE was bought by Amazon in December, 2008.
Ian Birch is "former editorial director of Hearst UK and Emap. He began his magazine career in the late 1970s as a reporter for Melody Maker before moving to Smash Hits where he was assistant editor for three years. His first launch and editorship came in the late 1980s with Sky Magazine. At Hearst UK he was publisher of Company, Esquire and Harper's Bazaar. Prior to working at Hearst, Birch was chief content officer at TV Guide in New York for four years; and before this he was editorial director at Emap for more than 10 years, where he helped to launch Red, Closer, [and] Grazia." His book Uncovered: Revolutionary Magazine Covers: The inside stories told by the people who made them kicks off with covers from the late 1950s, about as far back as you can go [ if you want to interview the people who both created the covers and are still alive to talk about it], and brings us up to 2017; you know, when big-run print magazines died.
Paul Wells is a leading Canadian political journalist and author. We met at his offices in Ottawa to talk about his impressive career, and his craft writing about politics for newspapers, magazines, books, and now Substack. Topics covered include: observing and interviewing politicians; reading and remembering history; putting events into context; pre-revolutionary Paris; pedagogical magazine writing; helping people; recited formulas, thrown slogans, and knowing you're being lied to; the difficulty politicians experience making a difference; discussing issues in their full complexities; “the wall of words,” “the significant trifle,” including yourself and analysis in your narratives; paying for Substack subscriptions because you want to comment; filling the ‘weekend supplement' niche; understanding each other as neighbours; and the secret to a successful marriage.
“Lucian Bernhard (1883-1972) was one of the great founders of modern graphic design. In a career spanning nearly five decades in Berlin and New York, Bernhard laid the foundation for a new language of form and communication. His brilliant posters, advertisements, book designs and typefaces created the very look of the twentieth century and beyond. In this lavishly illustrated book, noted design historian Christopher Long traces Bernhard's life and career, uncovering new truths and demolishing old myths.” Long studied at the universities of Graz, Munich and Vienna, and received his doctoral degree at the University of Texas at Austin in 1993. Trained as a cultural historian, his dissertation was a study of the Viennese architect and designer Joseph Frank. He has since written extensively on various aspects of Central European Modernism and has published monographs on a number of notable central European emigre architects and designers in the United States. We talk about his latest, Lucian Bernhard. I learned about it from Steven Heller's essential Daily Heller, and was thrilled to see that it was published by Kant Books, based in Prague. All I had to do was to walk about ten minutes from my apartment doorstep to my favourite bookstore, Kavka Books, to pick up a copy.
I interviewed Nick Anthony a year or so ago about his experience writing a first novel and getting parts of it work-shopped. Today I catch up with him to find out what he's been doing and where he's at now on the road to getting his first book published. We talk about, among other things, how AI has helped him in the writing process; subjective and objective readers; the difference between screen writing and novel writing; Noam Chomsky on plagiarism; Elon Musk on Harry Potter; chess; photography; Joyce's Ulysses; Marcel Proust writing about me going to the corner store to buy a bag of milk; and more. The “Josh” I reference towards the end of the conversation is Josh Dolezal, who was a recent guest on The Biblio File podcast. He talked about, among other things, the experience of trying to find a literary agent.
John Sargent was too young to fight in WW ll but he spent years battling Amazon and Google in the trenches on behalf of publishers and authors, protecting copyright and defending book prices. John grew up on a cattle ranch in Wyoming. Over forty years he worked at six publishing companies, including Simon & Schuster where he was the publisher of the Children's Division, and Dorling Kindersley where he was CEO. For the last half of his career he was the CEO of Macmillan. He's the author of three children's books and is currently chairman of The Ocean Conservancy. We met via Zoom to talk about some of the fights he's had over the years and other stories presented in his new memoir entitled Turning Pages, The Adventures and Misadventures of a Publisher. We also talk about crying and bravery, McDonald's, Monika Lewinsky, George Bush Sr., suicide, Donald Trump, fucking sea urchins, and more.
Joshua Doležal is a writer and award-winning teacher with 20 years of experience in publishing and editing. His mentor was Ted Kooser, former Poet Laureate of the United States and Pulitzer Prize winner. Josh's work has appeared in more than 30 magazines including The Kenyon Review and The Chronicle of Higher Education. His memoir Down from the Mountain Top: From Belief to Belonging was short-listed for the 2016 William Saroyan International Prize. He writes at The Recovering Academic on Substack, AND...he's a “book coach”. What's a book coach? We met via Zoom to answer this question. Topics discussed include: the roles of a book coach and the qualifications you need to be one; writing tools that Josh recommends his clients use; the concept of defamiliarization; horror films and the element of surprise; three-step strategies for drafting manuscripts; Lisa Cron; James Paterson; turning points, resolutions and reckonings; tent poles and cairns; the importance of discovering things while you write; literary agents; advice for me on my podcast catalogue “book” project; Sting's backlist; pertinent questions to ask yourself if you want to write a book, such as: ‘why are you writing this book?' and ‘why should readers care?'; plus, much more.
James Daunt calls him "the best of the best in U.K. publishing, constantly challenging the industry to move on when it drags its feet." Listen to my conversation with Andrew Franklin to learn why. Andrew is founder and, until recently, publisher of Profile Books, an award-winning British independent publishing house which launched in 1996. Best-selling authors on its list include Mary Beard, Margaret Macmillan, Simon Garfield (Just my Type), and Lynne Truss, whose Eats, Shoots, Leaves (2003) sold more than three million copies worldwide and won Book of the Year at the British Book Awards in 2004. Serpent's Tail, founded by Pete Ayrton in 1986, became an imprint of Profile in 2007. It publishes distinctive, award-winning international fiction. Viper Books, a crime imprint, was added in 2019. I met with Andrew at Profile's offices in London. We talk about, among other things, how much he made off Eats, Shoots, Leaves; selling paperbacks at Hatchards; Tim Waterstone; my tee-shirt; admiration as a key component of successful publishing; conviction and effort, judgement and horse-racing; taste and fashion; tee-shirt designer briefs; "content before commerce;" risk; rom-com; Hilary Mantel; the importance of style versus substance; Goethe; marketing, distribution and sales; taking books seriously; getting the right books into the right hands; freedom of the press; Butler to the World; non-conformism; and Mary Beard's Emperor of Rome. You might want to pay special attention to how Andrew speaks about Mary Beard and her book. And Margaret Macmillan for that matter. The enthusiasm, vigour, conviction. Belief. They're trademarks of all great publishers.
Here's how the Carcanet Press website describes him: Michael Schmidt FRSL, poet, scholar, critic and translator, was born in Mexico in 1947; he studied at Harvard and at Wadham College, Oxford, before settling in England. Among his many publications are several collections of poems and a novel, The Colonist (1981), about a boy's childhood in Mexico. He is general editor of PN Review and founder as well as managing director of Carcanet Press." Michael has been applying his judgement publishing poetry and fiction for more than fifty years “discovering” and rediscovering, along the way, many of the greatest writers of our age. We met at the Carcanet offices in Manchester to talk about, among others things, what he does; Germans in Mexico; the love of poetry; The Harvard Advocate; magazines as good tools for book editors; the importance of the past; the difference between editing books and magazines; poets John Ashbery and Edgell Rickword; writers starting on the left; generous patrons: Baron Robert Gavron; prosody; syllabics; leaving room for the reader; overproduction being a straight path to bankruptcy; an education at Oxford; Milton; the Understanding Poetry anthology; writing letters; the centrality of politics; notions of balance and continuity; principles of permanence and change; the difference between taste and judgement; catalysts; the Yiddish saying: “One word is not enough, two is too many.” Changing literary culture; Wallace Stevens; enhancing, extending and revitalizing the language…all this in tandem with a chorus of Manchester trams piping in, in the background, throughout the conversation.
Andrew Nash is Reader in Book History at the Institute of English Studies, University of London (a leading book history scholar in other words) and Director of the London Rare Books School. We sat down in the stacks at the Mark Longman "Books about Books" Library at the University of Reading (well, actually the Museum of English Rural Life in Reading which is somehow connected to the University and its publishers' archives collections) to talk about a course Andrew teaches at the London Rare Book School on how to use/work with publishers' archives. Though this topic may sound a tad niche, even for this podcast, it's not. Andrew makes the convincing case that publishers' archives are in fact of interest to many scholars, and have value precisely because they can be studied from many different economic, social, and cultural perspectives. Publishers' archives yield, among other things, fascinating, detailed information about how knowledge and "culture" is “made public” in society. They're not just about author-publisher correspondences, though these in themselves are justly recognized and valued as essential documents of cultural heritage, no, they're about providing scholars, and the world at large, with rich source documentation, from which all of us can better understand...yes, everything! Archives referenced during our conversation include those of Allen & Unwin, Chatto and Windus, Longmans, John Murray, George Routledge, and The Hogarth Press.
Sir Tim Waterstone revolutionized bookselling in Britain and changed the country's cultural landscape. He also wrote a memoir, called The Face Pressed Against a Window (Atlantic, 2019). We met at The Garrick Club in London to talk about the book, and about how he accomplished what he accomplished. Topics covered in our conversation include Tim's troubled relationship with his father, his eight children, the creative strategy behind growing the Waterstones empire (starting in 1982); an epiphany in Cambridge's Heffers Bookshop; Waterstones' "happy" family; W.H. Smith, James Daunt, author support, a combative attitude; offering a huge range of titles for sale and staying open longer hours; Miss Santoro's bookshop in Crowborough; seeing a market and making accessible an unprecedented selection of literature; the brilliance of the John Sandoe Bookshop in Chelsea; the "perfect stock, perfect staff, perfect control" mantra, bookstores as literary festivals, and the importance of book sales per square foot.
I was in Ireland recently to interview two of the best novelists on the face of the planet. John Banville, in Dublin, and David Mitchell, in Cork. As a cost-cutting measure I decided to ask them both the same questions: What do you do? How do you do it? Why do you do it? And: Why does it matter? I got diametrically opposed answers. So much for my cherished ambition of capturing definitive, unified explanations of what the best novelists (in this case) do, and how they do it at the dawn of the 21st century. David Mitchell is compelled to make narrative. Better and better narrative. He are his novels, in order: Ghostwritten (1999) Number9Dream (2001) Cloud Atlas (2004) Black Swan Green (2006) The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (2010) The Bone Clocks (2014) Slade House (2015) Utopia Avenue (2020) Ghostwritten takes place all over the world - ‘from Okinawa to Mongolia to New York City' and is told in interconnecting stories by nine different narrators. It won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize (best work of British literature written by an author under 35) and was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award. number9dream and Cloud Atlas were both shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. In 2003 David was selected as one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists.' In 2007 Time magazine included him among their 100 Most Influential People in The World. In 2018 he won the Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence, given in recognition of a writer's entire body of work. In other words, David is a best practitioner. He lives about an hour's drive from Cork. We met downtown for a taste of the city and a bite to eat. The better part of our afternoon was spent chatting about love and literature, and searching for a quiet place where we could clock our Biblio File best-practitioner conversation. Lovely, colourful city Cork. Tad noisy. We don't talk much about specific books but we do attempt an "understanding" of the novel writing process in light of how David has gone about creating his wonderful Balzacian oeuvre. Stay tuned for the Biblio File Back-story.
Early on in this conversation there's a dead patch. The mic didn't pick up the glorious seagull call that comes reverberating down the chimney into the room John Banville and I were sitting in. John Banville is an Irish novelist, short-story writer, and screenwriter who hates his own work. He's won a ton of prizes ("hundreds") including the Booker in 2005 for The Sea. He's currently waiting on the Nobel. John published his first novel, Nightspawn, in 1971, and his first book, a collection of short-stories called Long Lankin, in 1970. In addition to the "literary" work he's also written a string of popular crime novels. We met at his home in Howth; Howth, as you'll know, is located near that meadow in Ulysses where James Joyce has Molly Bloom saying: "…the sun shines for you he said the day we were lying among the rhododendrons on Howth head in the grey tweed suit and his straw hat the day I got him to propose to me yes like now yes 16 years ago my God after that long kiss I near lost my breath yes he said I was a flower of the mountains yes so we are flowers all a woman's body yes that was one true thing he said in his life and the sun shines for you today yes…" "…I was a Flower of the mountains yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him and yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will yes." John mentions what a curse it is to have Joyce, and Yeats (who, as you'll also know, wooed Maude Gonne on Howth Head), et al, writing like this, constantly looming in the rearview mirror; I follow on with the regular drill, asking John: what he does, how he does it, why he does it, and why it matters.
Last year I interviewed Margaret Atwood about "the role" of the writer. No such thing she informed me. So we talked about the "non-role." Combatative she is. Just like Tim Parks. He talks with me here about the other end of the spectrum, the reader. How to be a better one. I want him to be prescriptive, he won't be. But he does provide a lot of excellent insights, despite the resistence. Tim is an author, essayist, and translator. He was born in Manchester in 1954, grew up in London, and studied at Cambridge and Harvard. Not sure where or if he graduated from anywhere, but no matter. He's written 19 novels including Europa, Destiny, and most recently Hotel Milano, plus numerous works of non-fiction, including Where I'm Reading From, which we reference during our conversation. He's a regular contributor to the London Review of Books and the New York Review of Books. Aside from his own writing he has translated works by Moravia, Pavese, Calvino, Machiavelli and Leopardi from Italian into English. He's a very astute reader. A best practitioner I'd say, which makes him eligible to be a Biblio File podcast guest - given that our mission is to interview the best in the world of books. I invited him to talk about how "best" to go about reading a book. We talk about Borges's essays - notably one on James Joyce's perfect reader; an author's manner of addressing the reader, what the reader brings to the text, having an open attitude about what you read; Thomas Hardy; D.H. Lawrence as one of Hardy's best readers; Mortimer Adler; being argumentative, and more.
Marta Sylvestrova is a curator and art critic, and has headed the graphic design department at the Moravian Gallery in Brno, Czech Republic, since 1986. She is a graduate of Masaryk University where she studied art history, and has, over the years, been involved in the organizing of many Brno Biennieles. They feature and evaluate graphic designs from around the world every two years, alternating for many years, between celebration of book jacket design and poster design. It closed, somewhat controversially, in 2018, I went to Brno to talk to Marta about this controversy, but also, primarily, to talk about a big, beautiful four kilogram exhibition catalogue she edited 20 years ago entitled Czech Film Posters of the 20th Century, published in 2004 by the Moravian Gallery.
Nic Bottomley is a bookseller, and co-owner with his wife Juliette of Mr B's Emporium of Reading Delights, an independent bookshop based in Bath that has twice been named UK Independent Bookshop of the Year. Prior to setting up shop Nic was a capital markets lawyer. He currently serves as Executive Chair of the Booksellers Association of UK and Ireland. We spoke via Zoom about his innovative "Reading Spas," about approaching customers, and reading related to passions and careers; other topics discussed include: themed displays, arrogant book selection, whether or not the bookselling model is broken, the Elliott Bay Bookstore in Seattle, honeymoons, butchery novels, work-related reading lists, paying attention to detail, biblio-therapy, work ethics, a bookshop's personality, “the browse,” and way more.
The Umberto and Elisabetta Mauri Booksellers School was founded in 1983 by Luciano Mauri in memory of his father and his daughter, who died prematurely. "In the course of almost thirty years of teaching activity it has trained new generations of booksellers and has become a laboratory for experimentation and discussion on the possibilities of the book. The first example in Italy, second in Europe, after Frankfurt, the School promotes a discussion that does not remain limited to the organization and management of the point of sale, but which extends to all aspects involving the activity of the bookshop: distribution, marketing and promotion." I met with the head of the School, Nana Lohrengel, at her offices in Milan. We talk, among other things, about what's taught at the school, about Germany's bookseller apprentice program, and about the importance of curiosity in bookselling and keeping current; also, about exchanging knowledge with fellow booksellers, "handselling" books via Instagram and Facebook, about Libraccio's bookstores in Milan, and about bookstores and democracy.
Ricky Cavallero was CEO of the Spanish-language publisher Random House Mondadori for eight years. In 1995 he joined Mondadori as Director of Marketing Books; two years later he was appointed General Manager of the Spanish subsidiary and launched the Alexandros trilogy by Valerio Massimo Manfredi which became a huge best-seller. In 1999 he inaugurated the Grijalbo Mondadori bookshop in Havana. In 2000 he returned to Italy as director of Books Edizioni Mondadori. The following year, the Random House Mondadori joint venture was established and Cavallero assumed the position of Chief Executive Officer initially based in New York and then, from 2004, in Barcelona. In 2010 he was appointed General Manager of Libri Trade Mondadori and Chief Executive Officer of Einaudi, under which the Piemme, Sperling & Kupfer and Frassinelli houses operated. In 2016 he launched a new venture, founding his own house, called SEM Società Editrice Milanese. He sold it in the Spring of 2023. We met in Milan to talk about his take on book publishing. Topics covered include Libya, the Hoepli bookstore in Milan, Hemingway, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, nipples, different ways of looking at Latin America, atlases, nationalism, the fun of hitting the big one, Sonny Mehta, buying Fifty Shades of Grey, the impact of Covid, travel and understanding the world, meeting people, diversity, Africa, new writers, exiles and revolutions, bars, interesting people, getting 'out there;' listening, and asking questions, participating in life, partying, SEM, weekly dinners being a better investment than advertising, jazz music, Verso Bar and Bookshop in Milan, jamming with Ken Follett, offering stages for new voices, and giving birth.
Matteo Columbo is Margaret Atwood's publicist and personal magician at the Ponte alle Grazie publishing house in Italy. We met in Milan to discuss, among other things, the relationship between magic and publicity, the things that Margaret's handlers insist must be present in her hotel rooms; banana tricks, surprises, examples of how to gain the attention of journalists, Ponte alle Grazie's eclectic backlist, Luigi Spagnol, books as unique entities, the impact of Margaret's in-person Italian appearances, comparisons between publicity and photography; trustworthiness, syntax, and more.
I saw Dan Fridd in action promoting Edelweiss "the book industry's platform to market, sell, discover, and order new titles" at the RISE Bookselling Conference in Prague a few weeks ago and knew I had to have him on the show. Dan is Client "Success" Manager for Edelweiss. We talk about the company, his career in bookselling IT, and how "Above the Treeline" provides booksellers with the big picture; about book sales, inventory management, pie charts, Barbara Kingsolver's The Lacuna, the John Sandoe Bookshop in London, Ann Arbor, Michigan, book conversations opening up your world, marina management software, yachts, coding, data splicing, browsing publisher sales catalogues, analytics, creating your own catalogues, the Book Bugs and Dragon Tales bookshop, Norwich, Mitch Kaplan, and gigs in the Cayman Islands. Sure this may all sound a bit stodgy to non-booksellers, but I'm telling you, Dan gives dynamite interview.
Maria Hamrefors was appointed chairwoman of the Swedish Booksellers Association in 2019 after a long career in the book industry. Previous positions include CEO of Akademibokhandeln, CEO of Bokus, CEO of Norstedts Publishing Group, CEO of Thomson Corp in Sweden and director of Sweet & Maxwell Group in the UK. She is the treasurer of the European and International Booksellers Federation (EIBF) and a member of the EIBF executive committee. We met at the RISE Bookselling Conference in Prague last month to talk about, among other things, how to turn around a chain bookstore, difficult cost cutting decisions, showing books face out, active curation, customer clubs, loyalty, fourth generation family businesses, discovering "best" information, trust, conspiracy theories, critical thinking, shared love of books, and the best life advice ever.
Putin is murdering Ukrainians. Xi is likely perpetrating a genocide on the Uyghurs. He's also threatening to murder Taiwanese, and he's crushing democracy in Hong Kong. Trump is ignoring the rule of law. Florida is censoring books. Why am I doing what I'm doing? Why have I interviewed more than 600 people about the book? Well, precisely to help contribute to a better understanding of how best to stop these types of things from happening; how best to come up with and fashion good, big complex, ideas and make them public, get them discussed, motivate people to act on them, get governments to make the world a better, safer place. These are dangerous times. Books and bookstores are more important than ever. Despite the country's relatively low literacy rate, relative to other countries in the EU that is, Italians do understand this, and their government has done something about it. I met Barbara Hoepli in Prague last month at the RISE Bookselling Conference. She'd just delivered a talk on the Italian bookselling business which referenced Italy's Levi (Fixed Price) Law. It limits the size of discounts that can be "levied" on books sold in the country. It's designed to help grow and support the book sector, and literacy, and culture - tangible proof, it is, of the importance Italians assign to books and bookstores in their society. I figured it was worth talking with Barbara, not only because she has a beautiful voice and accent, but, primarily, because she's been in the book business all of her life directing both a major educational publishing house and a sizeable bookstore in Milan. We talk here about, among other things, market regulation, books being the cornerstone of our society, learning from the past, the name "Barbara," her family's 150 year history with books, and how books help us to grow and create. And yes, I left in the sound of her phone ringing (apologies, it's loud and startling). I figured it provides an extra peel of information - one that helps the listener better understand who she, Barbara, is as a person. Maybe not. You tell me.
Jeff Deutsch is a devoted reader, browser and lifelong bookseller. He's the director of Chicago's iconic Seminary Co-op Bookstores, and has written a book entitled In Praise of Good Bookstores (Princeton, 2022) in which he calls for a re-imagining of the current bookselling model, one that incorporates more than just retail, that adequately values the important work done by booksellers for their communities and democracy, and that appreciates the incomparable experiences that bookstores offer their patrons. We get into what "good" means, how a new model of bookselling might be funded; establishing new institutions and supporting the cause; about the ephemeral and the eternal, stars and blossoming fruit trees, William Blake, Robert Musil, mammon, Socrates learning to play the flute, the gift of finding something, or one, to love and knowing that this too shall pass; about the joys of "the browse," and thrift stores; capitalism, socialism, what people value, and civic-mindedness; Amazon, and underpaid work; James Daunt; Blundstones; old cowboy shirts, "slow time," Stendhal; bottling enthusiasm, Leon Forrest's Divine Days, Jaipur, and so much more. Photo Credit: Sally Blood
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 of America's truly great book designers. It's hard to describe this conviction. His work just looks and feels right to me. "Read me." it says. "I'm worth looking at." It's worth looking at of course because it's a product of years of dedicated study, and passionate practice. These kind of deeply precious objects don't just appear out of nowhere. Take the type for example. Its selection, how it augments the arguments and value propositions put forward in these catalogues; how it adds to their credibility, their conviction, makes the words seem more important. Or the aptness of the paper choices, their relevant colours, the statements made by their weights and textures. The way the choice of ink pigments clarify and emphasize. It all burnishes the larger persuasive effect. But enough waxing. I recently decided that when I finally do come up with a manuscript, I want Jerry to turn it into a book. That "when" in fact, is now, while I'm here in Prague. I plan to write eight or nine profiles of a select set of people I've interviewed over the years. With this in mind I recently Zoomed Jerry, prior of course to having written a word. Our conversation focuses solely on how beautiful the end product might look if Jerry deigns to design it. We start with what he needs in order to get going: words and pictures, and specs. Then we look at the three publishing options that exist.
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 the more adventurous Americans do the heavy lifting in exchange for a commission - collected by bankers, accountants and lawyers - which was then sent offshore, where returns were better, and taxes lower or non-existent. The documentary, based on French economist Thomas Piketty's best-selling book of the same name (Harvard University Press, 2014) - a copy of which I've just bought for the second time - tells the story of how fights over capital resulted in two world wars, followed by a mid-century golden period during which the wild beast was tamed and the promise of a merit-based economic system, among other things, was briefly realized, until the animal was unleashed again thanks to Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Today inequality is at the same frightful extremes experienced prior to the world wars. Will we repeat the same devastating mistakes, knowing what we now know? The film is a warning; and director Justin Pemberton delivers it with all the power of his medium. I talk with the New Zealander (!) about how he went about converting Piketty's startling 800-page narrative of capitalism's past, present and future, into a fast-paced, thrilling, persuasive, on-screen polemic.
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. After graduating he decided to study architecture at Columbia University. In 1905 he moved from New York to Monhegan Island in Maine home to a summer art colony where he found inspiration in the natural world. He found success exhibiting and selling his paintings in New York and in 1907 was given his first solo show at Claussen Galleries. The following year he married his first wife, Kathleen Whiting, with whom he had five children. For the next several decades he lived a peripatetic life, chilling in Connecticut, Maine, and New York. During this time he took extended voyages to remote, often ice-filled, corners of the globe: Newfoundland, Alaska, Tierra del Fuego, and Greenland, to which he made three separate trips. For Kent, exploration and artistic production were twinned endeavors. His travels to these rugged, rural locales provided inspiration for both his visual art and his writings. He developed a stark, realist landscape style that expressed both nature's harshness and its sublimity. Kent's human figures, which appear sparingly, often signify mythic themes, such as heroism, loneliness, and individualism. Important exhibitions of works from these travels include the Knoedler Gallery's shows in 1919 and 1920. Kent wrote a number of illustrated memoirs about his adventures abroad, including Wilderness: A Journal of Quiet Adventure in Alaska (1920) By 1920 he had taken up wood engraving and quickly established himself as one of the preeminent graphic artists of his time. His striking illustrations for two editions of Herman Melville's Moby Dick— precise and abstract images that drew on his architect's eye for spatial relations and his years of maritime adventures—proved extremely popular and remain some of his best-known work. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s his print output included advertisements, bookplates, and Christmas cards. His satirical drawings, created under the pseudonym “Hogarth Jr.,” were published in magazines such as Vanity Fair, Harper's Weekly, and Life. By the onset of World War II, Kent was focusing energy on progressive political causes, including labor rights and preventing the spread of fascism in Europe. Though he never joined the communist party his support of leftist causes made him a target of the State Department which revoked his passport after his first visit to Moscow in 1950 (though Kent successfully sued to have it reinstated). As his reputation declined at home and his work fell out of favor, Kent found new popularity in the Soviet Union, where his works were exhibited frequently in the 1950s. I visited Scott at his book-filled home in Boonville, in upstate New York, to trace the arc of Kent's life through the lens of various items in Scott's extensive collection of Kentiana
Is failure an inherent part of the writing "enterprise"? Yes, I'd say, this is undoubtedly true. If seen, however, solely as an "exercise" in itself, does this still hold true? I'm not quite so sure. These are the axes along which I tread during my conversation with Stephen Marche about his valuable new book On Writing and Failure: Or, On the Peculiar Perseverance Required to Endure the Life of a Writer, an essay published by Biblioasis. We talk about, among other things, fulfillment, learning, self-knowledge, horse-feathers, attention, Jesus, Beckett, privacy, connection, writing and failure of course, intention, recognition, fame, meaning, communication, money, futility, perseverance, success, publishing, expletives, essays, Confucius, Socrates, Samuel Johnson, depression, mental health and illness, comfort, getting your balls cut off, fame, mock executions, resonance, and the cure for cosmic loneliness.
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 two produced together in Eros, Fact and Avant Garde magazines during the 1960s, discussing magazine design, sex, risk, censorship, advertising, typography and the shape of language, U&lc (Upper & Lower Case) Magazine, lettering, aesthetics, humour, Marilyn Monroe, Bert Stern, JFK, Grace Kelly, and the vindictiveness of Robert Kennedy.
Andy Hughes is Senior Vice President of Production and Design at Knopf Doubleday, and I really wanted to know what he had to say. During a recent conversation with Lizzie Gottlieb about her new documentary film Turn Every Page, listen here, she mentioned that she regretted not being able to include what Andy had had to say about producing Bob Caro's books. So, I contacted Andy and asked him to give me the goods. He kindly agreed to talk. He's superb on what goes into the making of a good book. Going back 40+ years and returning to the present, he talks to me authoritatively about everything from hot metal and linotype machines, to mainframes and desktop computers; locked pages, repros and offset printing plates, to goldenrods, long galleys, and folded signatures; Smythe sewing and cloth cases to off-shore and laser printing, print on demand, paperless offices and remote proof-reading. Basically all the stages of book manufacturing, how they've evolved over the years that Caro has been writing books, and how the standards of production have and have not been maintained or replicated since that first edition of The Power Broker was published in 1974. Among many other things we learn that Caro has chosen not make e-book versions of his work available to the public. I love that.
Last year when John Duffy, a Canadian political strategist and writer, died at the age of 58, I noticed an outpouring of genuine love, and sadness, on Twitter, along with frequent references to his book Fights of our Lives. It was called one the best ever written on Canadian politics. So I picked up a copy. It's filled with dozens of old photographs, and images of period posters, and flyers, buttons, correspondence, and other fascinating bits and pieces of ephemera and memorabilia: the 'confetti of history' as Walter Benjamin liked to put it, plus it features these great 'diagrams' of game plans, 'playbooks,' that John came up with to explain the strategies and tactics used in what he considered to be the five most consequential elections in Canadian history. It was visually captivating, and a fun informative read, so I decided to feature it on The Biblio File Book Club. But who to engage with? Several people suggested Justin Trudeau's close friend and advisor, Gerry Butts. After a bit of toing and froing, and my prematurely and, as it turns out, quite erroneously, dismissing him as a typical political bounder, it all came together. Gerry agreed to play ball. We met in person several days ago at the Chateau Laurier hotel in Ottawa. Gerry is currently Vice Chairman of The Eurasia Group, a risk management firm with offices around the world. We talk here about John Duffy's optimism, about whether or not elections matter; about cynicism, championship debating, Canada's business elite, the PBO's report on income inequality, the urban-rural divide, 1300 Dollarama stores, lifting children out of poverty, the King-Bing Affair, SNC Lavalin, the Manitoba School crisis, Wilfrid Laurier and Justin Trudeau's 'Sunny Ways,' kicking the can down the road; Lament for a Nation, and Mel Hurtig. There's a James Joyce quote. Gerry tells a joke about Franz Kafka on the way out the door, and I recommend that he reads Nora Krug's illustrated edition of On Tyranny. Plus another thing: we're both convinced that John Duffy's Fights of our Lives (egregiously it's both out of print and published by an American multi-national) should be made into a TV Series as soon as possible.
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 their spa. When I checked out they charged me for the massages and told me that I should see the $450 back on my card in 2-3 business days. Of course, this scam earns the hotel money at my expense. A tiny expense, but, when combined with all of the other visitors' tiny expenses, not tiny. This scam is similar to the one operated by the oil companies when they insist that you punch in the amount you think you'll need to spend filling your tank at their pumps. It's your money and time they're stealing. Peanuts per person, big coconuts together. Where's the government on this? The same place government is on poor banking services, the highest mobile phone rates in the world, and sky-high dairy prices. Nowhere. Canadian governments have abandoned Canadian consumers. Valets to the rich and big business they are; to an alarming degree. Which brings us to copyright legislation. Cravenly hidden in an omnibus Budget Bill (a tactic Trudeau swore he'd never use), Bill C-32 received royal assent on December 31, 2022. It extends copyright protection in Canada for writers and other creators from fifty to seventy years after they die. How does this benefit the public? It doesn't. Not at all. Does it provide added incentive for these authors to create and innovate? None. Does it help readers and researchers and teachers? No, it does the opposite. Lobbyists convinced the Trudeau government to extend copyright with one pathetic argument: that it brings Canada into compliance with other jurisdictions. Greed won out in other words. Now, no new works will come into the public domain in Canada for another twenty years. How does this affect books and readers, writers and publishers? I ask Michael Geist. He's a law professor at the University of Ottawa where he holds the Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce Law and is a member of the Centre for Law, Technology and Society. He has obtained a Bachelor of Laws (LL.B.) degree from Osgoode Hall Law School in Toronto, Master of Laws (LL.M.) degrees from Cambridge University in the UK and Columbia Law School in New York, and a Doctorate in Law (J.S.D.) from Columbia Law School - so he should know.
My GP took off on me last year. Landed some big gig in Geneva I think. He's a bright one. Not that I knew him very well. Only met him twice in six years. Anyhow, I went in for my tri-annual (once every three) check-up the other day. The nurse was pleasant. Told me he'd been working in the same clinic for 30 years. Adventurous, I thought. Then a student comes in. Also pleasant. Bit bland, but hey, I thought, it takes years to spice up character. Finally the resident/doctor arrives. Must've been in her mid-thirties. She was absolutely delightful. Smiling, smart, funny. What a difference she made. She lit up the room. Same can be said of Lizzie Gottlieb when she appeared on the screen. My screen that is, on Zoom. It was a delight to talk with her about Turn Every Page her new documentary (released December 30th, 2022 by Sony Classics). It features the 50-year relationship between writer Bob Caro, 87, and his editor Bob Gottlieb, 91. Turn Every Page has a delightful (yes, I know, I'm using it too much, but I figure if Caro can overuse a mot juste - "loom" in his case, according to Bob G. - so can I) soundtrack. It deftly conducts the viewer, and the two Bobs, through the film towards the pressing goal of completing Caro's biography of Lyndon B. Johnson. We see the two at work on the fifth and final volume of the book and in the process, learn about what they're both after: uncompromised (uncompromising?) excellence. The two are by nature industrious, and both have egos. Combine all of the above and you have the makings of both a classic book, and a very watchable documentary, one that gives you a feel for the magic in this unique relationship and a sense of the great joy that can be experienced between writer and editor as they make a book together. What you get with this film is a whimsical, entertaining glimpse at a very special kind of quiet alchemy. I had such fun with this project: watching the film, twice, re-reading parts of Bob Gottlieb's memoir Avid Reader, conducting the interview, editing it, and then right afterwards, going out for a walk and listening to it. I hope your experience with the listening part is as "delightful" as mine was.
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 for photographers. Besides, true artistic genius is rare, regardless of what field you're talking about.' 'Why are you singling out photography then?' 'Well,' I averred, 'as Alexey Brodovitch, Conde Nast's great art director once put it: 'To learn yourself is more difficult than to listen to a teacher...Please take everything I say with a grain of salt. My way of guiding people is by irritation. I will try to irritate you, to explore you... the more disagreement the more we learn.' The idea is that when you intentionally irritate someone they often respond with their best work. I like to try this on every now and again during an interview.' In fact, I tried it on last week, albeit unintentionally, during a conversation with Richard Charkin when I suggested that the relative success of his new publishing experiment might be attributable, in part at least, to the fact that he, and most of his clients, have money. Richard has achieved much over the years during a creditable, significant career. He got to the very top of the publishing world. Nothing more satisfying to him though, I'm guessing, than having launched and operated Mensch, his thriving little 'micro' publishing house. I wanted to know how he was getting on after four years at the helm, what he'd learned, and, as it turns out, whether or not others could duplicate what he's done without the benefit of his special place both in the publishing constellation and in the world at large. The conversation commences with a mission statement; then some meaningless platitudes about books, communicating and making the world a better place; then we talk about how much Richard invested up front in Mensch; about the criteria he uses for choosing which books to publish; about personality and commissioning books; about emails and what they mean; rejecting submissions; working with journalists, celebrities and non-celebrities; saving author proofs; growing backlists; hiring publicists; using print-on-demand; achieving diversity in the publishing industry; Rovers, Minis, and yes, fairness, plus much, much more. I was left with the impression that money has far less to do with creating a thriving publishing enterprise than does prudence, personality and good, new technology. Yes, it helps to be wonderfully communicative and outgoing, like Richard is, and observant. But what's inspiring here I think, the lesson if you will, is that if you follow Richard's lead, pay attention to what's going on around you, let others know what you're up to, keep tabs on technology, the chances are pretty good you'll be able to do some decent damage, and do it without having to spend a whole lot of money You may not get rich, but you can change the world, hopefully for the better, just as Richard's doing.
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 photographers of the 20th century. It can be found in Savant in a chapter entitled 'Residual Landscapes, The Photographs of Edward Burtynsky.' Here's a summary: 1. I educate myself to the fullest extent about the artist's life and work. 2. I make up a question list of at least two or three pages...The I throw the list away. 3. I begin the interview with something plucked from the uniqueness of the day, the inception of our new experience. 4. I listen. It's imperative to maintain situational awareness and stay in the moment. 5. I avoid leading questions 6. I probe for greater detail. 7. I re-ask questions 8. In the editing process I splice answers together from various "takes." There is no improvisation or invention 9. I strive to be self-effacing.
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 of the twenty-two books he's published over the past four decades. We sat down in his workshop, behind his house in Toronto, to talk about the book. Topics covered in this first installment of a two part conversation include: photography, bookmaking, relentless exploration, 'general aesthetics,' cultivating aptitudes, the blossoming of the photography market, Edward Weston, Aaron Siskind, decoding visual language, composition, respect, paying homage, the Ninth Street Show, Gordon Parks, learning as the key to existence, making every word count, the Paris Review's Writers at Work series, capturing the voice of the artist, the book as the medium of photography, and more.
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 short story form. His work is known for its satire, intense emotion and imagery. In fact, his whole career can be said - John says it himself in Temerity and Gall, the book we discuss here today - to have been an extended conversation with Ezra Pound's Imagism. In our chronological conversation we examine John's life (he was born in 1938) starting with England and his relationship with his father, clergyman Thomas Metcalf; we talk about John's work with Oberon Press, ECW, Porqupine's Quill, and Biblioasis; about him teaching in the Montreal school system and almost dying of boredom, about publishing textbooks, and drinking with Mordecai Richler; about Michael Macklem (some people think he was a dick); about early catastrophes with Jack David and Robert Lecker, a lack of communication with Tim Inkster, and a love of Dan Wells's ambition. It's not all just juicy Canadian publishing gossip however, we also discuss James Joyce and the advent of film and modernism, Hemingway's first short story and the misspelling of his name, the serious ideas that underpin John's writing and editorial practice, and the success he's enjoyed, over many decades, of getting important books published. And finally, in the end, there's his patient, respectful wife Myrna working in the other room.
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 because his passion for literature was infectious. Mark also was greatly appreciated by local authors, whose careers he championed and whose works he celebrated. And he was widely respected throughout the publishing industry, having built relationships over many years with booksellers and buyers at other stores, regional reps, editors, and top brass at the major publishing houses.” Mark served as president of the New Atlantic Independent Booksellers Association (NAIBA) from 2014 to 2016, and as a judge for the 2019 National Book Awards. He was 60 years old. I wanted to learn more about him. Brad suggested I interview Anton Bogomazov. He's responsible for buying books for P&P's two branch stores and knew Mark well. He too has an interesting resume, having lived in New York, Toronto, a tiny town in rural Japan and a suburb of Moscow. Anton, predictably, is a big reader, favouring many genres, including fiction of all kinds, queer lit/nonfiction, graphic novels and comics, essays, history, science, poetry and mythology (the original fiction). He tends to read four of five books at a time, and tries to be a good bookseller by having at least one not-yet-published book on his nightstand at all times. We talk about the role of book buyer; his experience, and how Mark approached the position.
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 subsequently joined him at Drawn and Quarterly, the Montreal-based publishing house founded by Chris Oliveros. Tom now works at D&Q as executive editor (and co-owner) alongside his wife, publisher Peggy Burns. His early work - its high production values, thoughtful design and 'bookshelf-ready' formats, plus experience earned as a comics retailer and distributor - presaged, one could say, an explosion in the popularity of graphic novels, one that was amply fueled by the impressive stuff he put out with various artists over the years at D&Q. I talk with Tom about his early love of comics, his work in comic book stores and his experiences publishing graphic novels; about his life with cartoonists and his work helping to build D&Q, plus the struggle experienced by the medium itself to be taken seriously. Drawn and Quarterly: Twenty Five Years of Contemporary Cartooning, Comics, and Graphic Novels serves as our guide. We met underneath the well-walked wooden floors of La Petite Librairie D+Q, the company's children's retail bookstore outlet in the Mile End district of Montreal.
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 novel which I'll shortly be 'book-clubbing' [having bookclub-type discussion, so to say] with James Daunt), book clubs, monthly book picks, etc. - for the company's promotional book strategy; developing campaigns with the publishing industry for important releases; negotiating 'exclusive' opportunities. Creating buzz basically, plus adding value to the experience of visiting a physical bookstore while taking market share away from Amazon without caring what they're up to. We look at B&N's pro-active influencing of taste and the leveraging of its role as big-time book recommender; plus there's a tiny bit of politics - the ethics of selling and profiting off stuff that might adversely affect democracy (only a tiny bit) - AND we discuss the recent explosion of Manga. As promised during our conversation, here are Shannon's top recommendations of the day: FICTION The Marriage Portrait Lessons in Chemistry The Rabbit Hutch Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence NONFICTION Ice Cold Turkey and the Wolf: Flavor Trippin' in New Orleans Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us Revolutionary: Samuel Adams Prisoners of the Castle
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 successful collaboration? Is this whole business ethical? I ask these and other bumptious questions of seasoned, successful ghostwriter and novelist Dan Paiser, plus I pose a few from interested party David Mitchell whose first novel, Ghostwritten, embroils us in a cacophony of narrative voices. Dan also delivers some excellent stories about Ivanka and The Donald, and Whoopi, and others, and we spend a bit of time talking about creativity, and Dan's latest novel, Balloon Dog.
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 Picard. She told me (well, actually, it's written on the website), that Monsieur Ed "favors stories set in peculiar worlds where reality and fantasy coincide. He feeds on compelling tales with the power to transcend the ordinary, arouse laughter or bring tears. Universal stories that can inspire introspection and contemplation. Although fiction is at the heart of his publications, Monsieur Ed is also interested in documentaries, graphic novels, and even your favorite kind of tea." Monsieur Ed lives in Montreal, Quebec, and so does Valerie, and, for the time being, so do I. So I went over to her place to interview her, and her little dog Benjamin, about the creative choices she's made over the past year, indeed the past five, and to get at the reasons she thinks explain why she won at Bologna.
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