The Biblio File hosted by Nigel Beale

Only seventeen women have won the Nobel Prize for Literature since it started in 1901. That's 17 out of 119 winners. In order to  rectify this imbalance, an important new prize has been established. The Carol Shields Prize for Fiction is "the first English-language literary award to celebrate creativity and excellence in fiction by women writers in the United States and Canada." I wanted to learn more about Carol Shields, so I read Startle and Illuminate, Carol Shields on Writing and interviewed one of its editors, Anne Giardini, who also happens to be Carol's daughter in addition to being a writer, and Chancellor of Simon Fraser University.  Startle and Illuminate is culled from decades worth of Carol's correspondence, essays, notes, comments, criticism and lectures,  and drawn together by Anne and her son Nicholas.  Anne and I talk here about, among other things, Carol's thoughts and advice on the craft of writing; redemption; Carol's voice on the page and in the air; the existence of ordinary, boring people; the invisibility of women's lives; group courage; rootedness; and candles matching housecoats. 

Dan Mozersky enjoyed a long and fruitful career in Canada's retail book industry. As a founding member of Indigo Books & Music's executive team he was instrumental in turning the company's vision into reality. During the 1990s he served as manager of U.S. Operations for Classic Books in New York. Prior to this he founded and owned a chain of retail bookstores in Ottawa and Montreal.  Active in the Canadian Booksellers Association (CBA), he served as director, vice president, and chair of various industry committees. In 1985 he was recognized by the Canadian Book Publishers' Professional Association as bookseller of the year.  We talk here in Part ll of our conversation about Dan's work with the CBA, and how he helped establish Indigo Books, Canada's largest chain of big box bookstores. 

Bill Waiser is a western Canadian historian. He has published more than a dozen books– many of them prize-winning. A World We Have Lost: Saskatchewan Before 1905, for example, won the 2016 Governor General’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction.  Bill has been appointed to the Order of Canada, awarded the Saskatchewan Order of Merit, elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, named a distinguished university professor, and granted a D.Litt. He was the 2018 recipient of the Royal Society of Canada J.B. Tyrrell medal, presented for “outstanding work” in Canadian history, as well as the 2018 Governor General’s History Award for Popular Media: The Pierre Berton Award. We talk about his most recent book In Search of Almighty Voice, Resistance and Reconciliation (Fifth House, 2020), about the life of Almighty Voice - a member of the One Arrow Willow Cree who died violently at the hands of Canada's North-West Mounted Police in 1897 - and how his violent death spawned a succession of conflicting stories — in newspapers, magazines, pulp fiction, plays and film; about how history is written and re-written, and why an 'accurate' depiction of the life and death of Almighty Voice matters.   Clarification: According to Statscan indigenous people make up 4.9% of Canada's population, 16.3% of Saskatchewan's population. 

Matt Dorfman is an internationally recognized designer and illustrator. He is the art director of the New York Times Book Review and former art director of the New York Times Op-Ed page. Additionally, he maintains a one-person office specializing in work for publishers, film, theater and various cultural institutions.    I talked with Matt recently about his selection of the best book covers of 2020 for the New York Times Book Review - dissecting his decision-making process and judgement calls. Among other things we discuss the differences between designing the book review and op-ed sections, the delays between creating a jacket design and it appearing in public, dust jackets capturing zeitgeists, the tension between commerce and art, the power of jealousy, gateway drugs John Gall, David Pearson, and Roy Kuhlman, being haunted by Barbara de Wilde, Carin Goldberg, and Louise Fili, collecting dust jackets, how much our wives hate books, and visual literacy.

Novelist, screenwriter and essayist Larry McMurtry is best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning 1985 novel Lonesome Dove, a sweeping historical epic that follows ex-Texas Rangers as they drive cattle from the Rio Grande to Montana. (Update: Larry died yesterday, March 25, 2021).  He grew up on a ranch outside of Archer City, Texas, which is the model for his fictional town of Thalia. A book collector, McMurtry purchased a rare book store in Washington, D.C.’s  Georgetown neighbourhood in 1970 and named it Booked Up. In 1988 he opened a second Booked Up in Archer City, establishing the town as a "Book City." This store is arguably the largest single used bookstore in the United States, carrying somewhere between 400,000 and 450,000 titles. McMurtry is well-known for the film adaptations of his work, especially Hud (from the novel Horseman, Pass By), The Last Picture Show; James L. Brooks’s Terms of Endearment, and Lonesome Dove, which became an enormously popular television mini-series. In 2006, he was co-winner (with Diana Ossana) of both the Best Screenplay Golden Globe and the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for Brokeback Mountain. I interviewed him ( in 2008) as part of a project I was working on for the Canadian Booksellers Association. We talk about his latest, Books: A Memoir, his life as a book rancher, having the right books, junk, the fun of the hunt, book-scouting, catalogues, bookstores and cultural vitality, keeping stock fresh, burning out on fiction and movies, the declining number of used book stores, and optimism for the future.

Richard Nash is a coach, strategist, and serial entrepreneur. He led partnerships and content at the culture discovery start-up Small Demons and the new media app Byliner. Previously he ran independent publishers Soft Skull Press and Red Lemonade where he published Maggie Nelson, Lynne Tillman, Vanessa Veselka’s Zazen, Alain Mabanckou, and many others. He was awarded the Association of American Publishers’ Award for Creativity in Independent Publishing in 2005. We met via Zoom (as I'm sure you'll be able to tell) to talk more about his article 'What is the Business of Literature?', about where publishing has been, technology and "the shock of the old," repurposing technology, essential reading, the influence of capitalism on publishing, copyright, great books not seeing the light of day, dance floors, reading, and the richness of book history.  

Will Schwalbe has spent most of his life in publishing: at William Morrow, and then at Hyperion, where he was Editor in Chief. In January 2008 he left Hyperion to found a startup called Cookstr.com and ran that for six years. It’s now part of Macmillan Publishers, where he has worked since 2014. His books include Send: Why People Email So Badly and How to Do it Better with his friend David Shipley. The End of Your Life Book Club, about the books he read with his mother when she was dying. And Books For Living, about the role books can play in our lives and how they can show us how to live each day more fully and with more meaning. He lives in New York City with his husband David Cheng In addition to Books for Living, we talk about Faber, Sonny Mehta, Rohinton Mistry, reasons for reading, adults reading to children - and their conversations, greater powers, book clubs, cook books, Christopher Isherwood, giving and sharing conversations about books for birthdays, tyranny, and my new venture, Literary Retreats.

Since 2012, Jason Rovito has been working with institutional and private collectors to grow the documentary value of their collections "because the Cloud forgets." Subject strengths include: the avant-garde, design, the human sciences, and visual culture  across the full spectrum of Special Collections formats: rare books, ephemera, manuscripts, photographs, prints, audio/visual materials, and archives. Jason is a member of the International League of Antiquarian Booksellers (ILAB), the Antiquarian Booksellers' Association of Canada (ABAC), and the Ephemera Society of America (ESA), and is committed to their codes of ethics. Based in Toronto, he regularly exhibits at fairs in New York, Toronto, and London. Jason has been touted by many as one of the talented "new antiquarians" who are discerning value in all sorts of interesting and unusual places. We talk about this entrepreneurial tradition among successful bookseller down the ages; about Italy, and prisons, and virtual book fairs, and much more. 

Marc Côté is President of Cormorant Books, a literary publishing house noted for its discovery and development of Canadian writing talent and the publishing of Quebecois fiction translated into English. He has won Canada's Libris Award for editor of the year twice, and Cormorant has won the Libris Award for small presses three times. At Cormorant Marc has acquired and edited many award-nominated books.  The Great Gatsby is a novel written by F. Scott Fitzgerald, published by Scribner's in 1925. Set in the Jazz Age on Long Island it depicts narrator Nick Carraway's relationship with mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby, and Gatsby's obsessive desire to reunite with his former lover Daisy Buchanan.  The Biblio File Book Club is series of book discussions with smart people about books that they believe are important; books they would recommend to loved ones...books they consider to be essential reading. Zoom wasn't behaving very well during our conversation, so apologies for the irritating distortions, etc.   

Richard Ovenden ​has been ​Bodley’s Librarian (the senior executive position of the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford) since 2014. ​He is a ​ Fellow​ at the​ Society of Antiquaries and Royal Society of Arts; ​a ​​member​ of the American Philosophical Society; Treasurer, ​at ​the Consortium of European Research Libraries; ​and ​President​ ​of ​the Digital Preservation Coalition. ​He was ​​awarded the OBE by The Queen in 2019.​    And almost as big a deal, he joined me recently on Zoom to talk about his new book, Burning the Books, a history of the deliberate destruction of knowledge; about the threats to libraries past and present; about fire, war, violence, obsolescence, complacency and underfunding. And about the fragility of libraries, and their fundamental importance to democracy, to truth and facts, to the rule of law, in short, to our treasured Western way of life.