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. ​H​e's best known for the catalogue he produced for a Christie’s auction that took place in 2014 that featured highlights from his collection. ​M​ore than 200 books, manuscripts, lithographs and erotic photographs ​w​ent 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.    ​T​ony 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 ​d​uring the mid-1980s​​ whe​r​e he cultivated both his love of books and an appreciation for the region. Today ​h​e shares these passions on Instagram and Facebook​, posting photographs of his journeys​throughout 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 ​t​he 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!

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.

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.