The Biblio File hosted by Nigel Beale

Martin Amis was born in Oxford in 1949 and is a British novelist, essayist, and memoirist - all of whom show up to contribute to his latest novel, Inside Story.    As it happens I read  Lolita in tandem with Inside Story, so the front-end of our conversation is laden with nasty Nabokovian-related questions. Since Vladimir, along with Saul Bellow, has heavily influenced Martin's writing over the years, I decided this was fair game.    Amis is best known for his novels Money (1984) and London Fields (1989). He received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his memoir Experience and has been nominated for the Booker Prize twice (shortlist for Time's Arrow and longlist for Yellow Dog). He served as Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Manchester until 2011, and is considered one of the most influential novelists of our times.     We met via Zoom to talk about everything he throws into this novel, plus the way he frames it. Nabokov looms large, as I say, as does Christopher Hitchens, and, towards the end, ketchup and relish. Like many of Amis's other works, Inside Story contains plenty of very good laughs - one pretty well every 3-4 pages (in between, I frequently caught myself wearing a wide smirk). There's a lot to be said for this, and for some genuinely beautiful writing in the novel, particularly about Israel; plus there's a fair amount of engaging literary criticism. In short, it's well worth  spending time with this excellent hybrid; as, I hope you'll agree, it is with this interview...   It starts mid-sentence, with the two of us talking about Chip Kidd's dust jacket design.

"Martin Parr's celebrated photographs bridge the divide between art and documentary photography. His studies of the idiosyncrasies of mass culture and consumerism around the world, his innovative imagery, and his prolific output have placed him firmly at the forefront of contemporary art. He is an avid collector and maker of photobooks. His own photobooks include The Last Resort (1986), Common Sense (iggg) and Boring Postcards (Phaidon Press, 1999), and he is the subject of the monograph Martin Parr by Val Williams (Phaidon Press, 2002)." Together with Gerry Badger he is the co-author of The Photobook: A History, a beautiful three-volume set of books that offer an engrossing, admittedly subjective survey of the "best" photography books ever published, beginning with early experiments in the medium in mid-19yh-century England and ending with "raucous Japanese photo-diaries of the 1990s." I question Martin about his collection criteria - how he arrived at "best," and how various artistic and social movements influenced the look and content of photobooks over the decades. 

...in which I posit that raising funds is a primary motivator explaining why scientists write, and Lawrence disagrees; and the two of us argue over the similarities and differences between art and science... The combatants tend to confuse human-made with nature-made art, and possibly don't even actually disagree, if we're talking big picture. Anyway, the conversation is lively, if nothing else. Throughout the episode we reference Lawrence's entertaining, readable book The Greatest Story Ever Told—So Far. It "deals with the current scientific understanding of the creation of the Universe and gives a history of how scientists have formulated the Standard Model of Particle Physics.   Lawrence Krauss is a writer and an American-Canadian theoretical physicist and cosmologist who has over the years taught at Arizona State University, Yale University, and Case Western Reserve University. He founded ASU's Origins Project, now called ASU Interplanetary Initiative, to investigate fundamental questions about the universe, and served as it's director. He retired in May 2019 and is currently President of The Origins Project Foundation and host of The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss.

Patrick McGahern has been operating an antiquarian bookshop in Ottawa, Canada's capital, since 1969. Today it continues to thrive under the management of Patrick's son Liam. The store specializes in Used and Rare Books, Canadiana, Americana, Arctic, Antarctic, Travel, Natural History & Voyages, Illustrated & Plate Books, Rare Books, Irish and Scottish History and Literature. I met Patrick via Zoom to celebrate his 51 years in business, to try to learn some of what he's learned over the years, and to talk about some of the more colourful bookseller colleagues in the trade, including Grant Woolmer, Jerry Sherlock and Bernard Amtmann

Roger Chartier​ was born​ in 1945 in Lyon, ​France. He is a giant in the field of ​book​ history ​and the study of ​publishing and reading.​ He teaches at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, the Collège de France, and the University of Pennsylvania.​ ​ I interviewed Roger via Zoom in hopes of determining exactly why he's a giant, who's shoulders he stands on, and what he has contributed to the study of book history. Among other things we talk about Roger's book of essays The Author's Hand and the Printer's Mind; Shakespeare and Cervantes; the importance of material texts to history; forms of reading; the codex; translation; intermediaries between the reader and the writer; the commonplace technique; Roland Barthes; reader appropriation; author intention; Marshall McLuhan; D.F. McKenzie's Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts; Robert Darnton; The History of the Book in France; IMEC; maps in fiction; "Sprezzatura​;" ​and literature and the consecration of the life and manuscripts of the writer. 

Toby Faber grew up with Faber & Faber - its books and stories have played an important role in his life. He was the company's managing director for four years and remains a non-executive director and chairman of sister company Faber Music. He has written two celebrated works of non-fiction, Stradivarius and Fabergé 's Eggs. His first novel, Close to the Edge, was published by Muswell Press in 2019. He lives in London with his wife and two daughters.    We met via Zoom to talk about his book Faber & Faber: The Untold Story. Toby tells the story in the words of those who founded and worked for the company during the 20th century. One of founder Geoffrey Faber (Toby's grandfather)'s great strengths, he says, was recruitment. ​Toby provides me with verbal sketches of many of those recruited to the firm, including T.S. Eliot, Morley Kennerley, Frank Morley, Richard de la Mare, Charles Monteith, Robert McCrum and others.    In addition to tracing the history of Faber we look at some of the reasons why it continues to thrive as an independent company, including the fact that, years ago, it chose to maintain control of publishing its own paperback editions of backlist titles.

Powell's Books is a chain of bookstores located in and around Portland, Oregon. It claims to be the largest independent new and used bookstore in the world. Powell's 'City of Books' store is located on the edge of downtown and occupies a full city block. It covers some 68,000 square feet or 1.6 acres of retail floor space. Emily Powell is a third generation owner of the bookstore. She made headlines this past August for dumping Amazon as a sales partner. To mark "Independent Bookstore Day"  she announced that "we will no longer sell our books on Amazon’s marketplace. For too long, we have watched the detrimental impact of Amazon’s business on our communities and the independent bookselling world." "The vitality of our neighbors and neighborhoods depends on the ability of local businesses to thrive," she continued. "We will not participate in undermining that vitality." I talked to her recently, via Zoom, about her stand against Amazon, her storied bookstore and the reasons for its successes and longevity. 

Tiphaine Guillermou is an editor with Graphéine, a design agency with offices in Paris and Lyon.  While researching 20th century French book design - so that I'd have some books to hunt down while visiting bookstores in France - I came across a terrific article Tiphaine had written for Graphéine's blog, here. It was exactly what I was looking for - filled with all sorts of great book collecting leads. I was so impressed with the article I decided to interview Tiphaine about it. Listen as we talk about Pierre Faucheux, Robert Massin, Gallimard, Stock, Whites and Yellows, Scorpion, the French Book Club, Le Livre de Poche, Folio, Monsieur Toussaint Louverture, Cent Pages editions,David Pearson, Zulma and much more.

Andy Hunter is the founder and CEO of Bookshop.org  He's also the publisher at Catapult, at Counterpoint and at Softskull, and, as if this isn't enough, publisher and co-creator at LitHub, and co-founder and chairman at Electric Literature.    Despite all of these responsibilities, Andy took the time to talk via Zoom about his latest venture and how to use it to help support indie bookstores, and, at the same time, stick it to Amazon. Bookshop.org is "an online book marketplace designed to support independent bookstores."   Among other things the two of us discuss how authors, publishers, reviewers, bloggers and others in the book publishing ecosystem can sign up as Bookshop.org affiliates and make 10% of the price of books sold on their sites (as opposed to 4.5% from Amazon); about Bookshop.org's huge selection of books shipping directly from the wholesaler and being delivered in 2-3 days; about physically touching paper pages and petting cats in brick and mortar bookshops; about the smells and sounds and conversations and coffee that can be had in real bookstores; about revitalizing downtowns; about the magic of reading; and about helping to ensure that all of this continues to be a thing.     According to Andy, Bookshop.org will be launching in Canada in the Spring of 2021.

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