The Biblio File hosted by Nigel Beale

According to his website, "In 1995, Bruce Batchelor rocked the publishing industry when he invented print-on-demand (POD) publishing and triggered a landslide of new books from every country in the world." Did he invent it? You'll have to listen to the podcast to find out.  Since 1995, more than 1,000,000 writers, says Bruce, "have seized the opportunity to be published through services such as Agio (his small publishing consultancy firm), Author Services, Kindle Direct Publishing and many other publishing houses." Bruce was CEO of Trafford Publishing for11 years, and is now owner/publisher at Agio Publishing House in Victoria, BC, Canada. He's a "bestselling" author and management consultant, and speaks at various writer and academic conferences. We talk here about the explosion in self-publishing that occurred during the 1990s, and the role that he and Trafford Publishing played in it.

"Ursula Nordstrom (1910 - 1988) was publisher and editor-in-chief of juvenile books at Harper & Row from 1940 to 1973. She is credited with presiding over a transformation in children's literature in which morality tales written for adult approval gave way to works that instead appealed to children's imaginations and emotions." She authored the 1960 children's book The Secret Language, and a  collection of her correspondence, edited by Leonard Marcus, entitled Dear Genius: the Letters of Ursula Nordstrom was published in 1998.   Harper's received three Newbery Medals and two Caldecott Medals during Nordstom's tenure. She edited some of the milestones of children's literature, including E. B. White's Stuart Little (1945) and Charlotte's Web (1952), Margaret Wise Brown's Goodnight Moon (1947), Crockett Johnson's Harold and the Purple Crayon (1955), and Syd Hoff's Danny and the Dinosaur (1958). Other authors she edited included Laura Ingalls Wilder, Ruth Krauss, and Charlotte Zolotow.    I talk to Leonard Marcus about everything Ursula.    Photo credit: Sonya Sones.

Marion Sinclair has been Chief Executive of Publishing Scotland since 2008, with responsibility for program management, funding bids, policy, the International Publishing Fellowship program, publishing practice issues and reporting to Creative Scotland. She has worked in the book publishing sector for more than 30 years, at Polygon from 1988-97 (awarded Sunday Times UK Small Publisher of the Year in 1993) then as a university lecturer in publishing, before joining PS in 2003. Marion is also a board member of the Gaelic Books Council (ex-officio), of the book distributor BookSource, and Literature Alliance Scotland, she's also a committee member of the Sabhal Mor Ostaig Library Advisory Group, and Saltire Society Publisher of the Year panel.   We met via Zoom to talk about what Publishing Scotland does to help Scottish publishers. Towards the end of our conversation I try to wheedle some advice out of Marion for Canada.

Conrad Black - in full, Conrad Moffat Black, Lord Black of Crossharbour - was born in 1944, in Montreal. He is an author, columnist, historian, and businessman who built the third largest newspaper group in the world during the 1980s and 1990s. At its height the organization controlled nearly 250 newspapers including the London Daily Telegraph, the Fairfax Group in Australia, The Jerusalem Post, Southam Press in Canada, and the Chicago Sun-Times.   Black studied history and political science at Carleton University in Ottawa, earned a law degree from Laval University in 1970, and a Masters degree in history from McGill University in 1973. For his thesis he wrote a biography of former Quebec premier Maurice Duplessis; published in 1977, it came to be considered a definitive work.   He entered the newspaper business in 1967 as part owner of two small Quebec weeklies, on the way to establishing his media empire. He currently lives in Toronto with his wife Barbara Amiel.    W​e met via Zoom to talk about his various book and model ship collections, Napoleon, Roosevelt, his collecting habits, and his long-term fulfilling relationship with books. First off however he vigorously defends himself against charges that were successfully levelled against him by U.S. federal prosecutors in the mid-2000s.

John Brookshire Thompson is a British sociologist,  a professor at the University of Cambridge, and a fellow of Jesus College. His work over the past two decades has focused particularly on the publishing industry. Books in the Digital Age: The Transformation of Academic and Higher Education Publishing in Britain and the United States (Polity, 2005) presents an analysis of higher education publishing from 1980 to 2005. Much of the analysis is based on industry interviews made on condition of anonymity. His Merchants of Culture (Polity, 2009) covers in a similar way, the entire publishing and bookselling industry from the 1960s to 2008.    We talk here about his latest book Book Wars: The Digital Revolution in Publishing (Polity, 2021) which tells the story of book publishing's wild ride over the past decade - the surge of e-books, the self-publishing explosion and the growing popularity of audiobooks - plus successful and failed attempts to create new businesses in this space. It's a comprehensive, dense (in a good way) human read; and, if you love books as I do, an extremely entertaining way to spend 15 hours or so.

Ruth Panofsky is Professor of English at Ryerson University in Toronto. She is a leading scholar of the history of publishing and authorship in Canada and Canadian Jewish literature, an award-winning poet and a Fellow of the Royal Society.    We met via Zoom to discuss her most recent book Toronto Trailblazers: Women in Canadian Publishing (2019, U of T Press) which explores the influence of seven women who helped advance a modern literary culture in Canada. "Publisher Irene Clarke, scholarly editors Eleanor Harman and Francess Halpenny, trade editors Sybil Hutchinson, Claire Pratt, and Anna Porter, and literary agent Bella Pomer made the most of their vocational prospects, first by securing their respective positions and then by refining their professional methods. Individually, each woman asserted her agency by adapting orthodox ways of working within Canadian publishing. Collectively, their overarching approach emerged as a feminist practice. Through their vision and method these trailblazing women disrupted the dominant masculine paradigm and helped transform publishing practice in Canada."   We talk about writing these women back into the history of Canadian publishing, and end off with a look at the challenges that face Canada's current book publishing industry.

Dwight Garner, an acclaimed journalist and book critic at the New York Times, dives into the fascinating world of classic 20th-century American book advertisements. He shares how authors were marketed as cultural icons, revealing the intricacies of branding and reader perception. Garner discusses the shift in advertising techniques, spotlighting impactful campaigns like 'Uncle Tom's Cabin.' The conversation also touches on the evolution of literary criticism and the nostalgic art of visual marketing, highlighting its lasting influence on readers today.

Mark Samuels Lasner is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Delaware Library, and one of the world's great book collectors. The Mark Samuels Lasner Collection focuses on British literature and art from 1850 to 1900, with an emphasis on the Pre-Raphaelites and writers and illustrators of the 1890s. It comprises more than 9,500 books, letters, manuscripts, photographs, ephemera, and artworks, including many items signed by such figures as Oscar Wilde, George Eliot, Max Beerbohm, William Morris, Christina and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Aubrey Beardsley. In 2016 Mark donated his collection, worth more than $10 million, to the University of Delaware. It's the largest and most valuable gift in the Library’s history.  We connected via Zoom to talk about Mark's childhood and his incipient interest in England and the late Victorian period, his early book collecting - the how and why of it - the extraordinarily talented and well dressed essayist, caricaturist, and critic Max Beerbohm; fun, friendships, favourite booksellers, fashion and much more.   

David Frum is a Canadian-American political commentator and a senior editor at The Atlantic. He is the author of ten books, most recently TRUMPOCALYPSE: Restoring American Democracy (HarperCollins, 2020). His first book, Dead Right, won praise from William F. Buckley as “the most refreshing intellectual experience in a generation” and from Frank Rich in the New York Times as “the smartest book written from the inside about the American conservative movement.” He is a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush, and authored the first book about Bush's presidency written by a former member of the administration. As a young man he was enamored with C.S. Forester's Hornblower stories. Together we examined two of them for The Biblio File Book Club. Listen as we talk about rice, morals, codes, lying, punishment, being true to yourself, normal lives, leadership, and the Mafia, among other things. 

Odette Drapeau is a leader, educator and innovator in the practice of fine bookbinding. She founded her bookbinding workshop The Headband in Montreal in 1979.  For more than 50 years she has refined her work though the innovative use of materials including fish leathers, high-tech fibres and LED lights. Through her creative use of stunning textures and colours she has achieved a level of excellence that has been widely heralded, including, most recently by The Alcuin Society which bestowed its Robert R. Reid Award for lifetime achievement in the book arts in Canada upon her. Odette is a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Art, and was head of the Association of Quebec Bookbinders between 1988-91. She has exhibited at solo and group shows more than fifty times at venues in Europe, Canada and the United States.  We talk here about her long, accomplished career, her thoughts about "the book," and her work philosophy.