The Biblio File hosted by Nigel Beale

Simon Beattie is a British antiquarian bookseller, literary translator and composer. He was the first British bookseller to be featured in Fine Books & Collections Magazine's series Bright Young Things.   Beattie was educated at Aylesbury Grammar School and the University of Exeter, where he took a double first in German and Russian (1997) and subsequently studied for an MA in Lexicography (1998), which he passed with Distinction. Whilst at Exeter, Beattie also held a choral scholarship at Exeter Cathedral. After a brief period freelancing in the publishing business Beattie joined the London antiquarian booksellers Bernard Quaritch Ltd in 1998. In January 2010 he set up his own company specialising in European cross-cultural history. His printed catalogues, entitled Short Lists, have won numerous awards.    He was a 2012 winner in the Smarta 100 Awards for 'the most resourceful, original, exciting and disruptive small businesses in the UK' and has taught at the York Antiquarian Book Seminar since its inception in 2014. It was Beattie who set in motion the worldwide strike by over 450 booksellers against AbeBooks' decision to withdraw from the Czech Republic, Hungary, Russia, and South Korea in November 2018. Beattie's translation of Gottfried Benn's shocking first poem 'Morgue' was published in 2018. His translation of the novel At the Edge of the Night by the German writer Friedo Lampe was published by Hesperus Press in 2019. Finally, Beattie also composes choral music. His setting of Advent Calendar, a poem by Rowan Williams, was broadcast on BBC Radio 3 as part of the 2008 Advent carol service from St John's College, Cambridge.   I met Simon in Boston, prior to last year's Antiquarian Book Fair, to talk books, more specifically endpapers and Simon's phenomenally successful 'We love Endpapers' Facebook group. We also talk about speaking foreign languages, cultures being curious about one another, exploration, the reception of Oscar Wilde in Russia, translation and censorship, pleasant surprises, marbled paper, brocade paper, bookseller catalogues, and enjoying what you do.

The Osborne Collection of Early Children's Books contains more than 80,000 items. The nucleus of the collection, which has a cut-off date of 1910, was donated to the Toronto Public Library in 1946 by a British librarian from Derbyshire, Edgar Osborne. Unable to get any English libraries to meet his conditions -  to properly house his books, describe them and publish a catalogue - he settled on Toronto, largely because he was so impressed by its Children's librarian Lillian H. Smith who he'd met during a visit to the library with his wife in 1934. I met with Librarian Jennifer Yan in late 2019. Listen as she explains why we literary tourists need to visit the Osborne Collection in Toronto.   

Robert Darnton is Harvard University's Carl H. Pforzheimer Professor, Emeritus and University Librarian, Emeritus He was educated at Harvard and Oxford (where he was a Rhodes scholar). After a brief stint as a reporter for The New York Times, he became a junior fellow in the Society of Fellows at Harvard. He taught at Princeton from 1968 until 2007 when he came to fill the roles mentioned above. Among his honors are a MacArthur Prize Fellowship, a National Book Critics Circle Award, election to the French Legion of Honor, the National Humanities Medal, and the Del Duca World Prize in the Humanities. He has written and edited many books, including The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclopédie (1979, an early attempt to develop the history of books as a field of study), The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (1984, his most popular work) and The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Prerevolutionary France (1995, a study of the underground book trade).     We met at his office in the Widener Library to talk, among other things, about why book history in so exciting; French police enforcing edicts on the book trade; The Private Life of Louis XV,  sex, scandal and politics; David Hall; the fertile crescent of publishing houses around France in the 18th century; book pirating; the communications circuit; and Roger Chartier, and the fluidity of texts.

Jessie Amaolo is a librarian at the Toronto Public Library responsible for their world-class Arthur Conan Doyle collection. Not surprisingly, much of the collection is devoted to Doyle's most famous character, Sherlock Holmes. But Conan Doyle wrote much more than just the Sherlock Holmes stories. He also wrote extensively on spiritualism, true crime, history, and current events. The collection is accessed through the Marilyn & Charles Baillie Special Collections Centre on the 5th floor of the Library, near Bloor and Yonge streets in Toronto, which is where we met to discuss why the literary tourist should visit here. 

 George Andreou was appointed director of the Harvard University Press (HUP) in September, 2017 replacing William P. Sisler who had been in the position for some 27 years. Born in New York, Andreou spent much of his early childhood in Greece. He graduated from Harvard College in 1987 with a degree in English literature and languages. Prior to coming to Harvard he was senior editor and vice president at Alfred A. Knopf where he founded Vintage Español, an imprint created to publish books in Spanish for the U.S. market. Over the years he edited the works of many impressive writers, including John Ashbery, Junot Díaz, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Sonia Sotomayor, and the Nobel laureates V.S. Naipaul and Orhan Pamuk. I sat down with George recently at his HUP offices in Cambridge, MA, to discuss, among other things, the practice of reading; the role of the editor; the temporality of writing, "what to say, what not to say, and when;" reading books at the right time; editors becoming publishers, the differences between university and trade publishing; peer review; book design; and Thomas Piketty's new book Capital and Ideology.

David Emblidge spent his childhood in Buffalo, New York and "on the sunny beaches of Ontario’s Lake Erie." After university he worked at the Associated Press as a reporter covering everything from the "disappearance of rural doctors to hog futures, and one murder." Before entering the publishing trade as a second career he spent ten rewarding years as a professor following on degrees in English (Univ. of Virginia) and American Studies (Univ. of Minnesota).   He worked in publishing for nearly twenty-five years – as acquisitions editor, book packager, publishing consultant, editor in chief, and publisher. The houses: Harvard University Press, Cambridge University Press, Continuum, The Mountaineers Books. He founded Berkshire House Publishers (travel, regional literature and history, food), and  eventually sold it to WW Norton. As a book packager, he produced multi-volume series on various subjects for major trade book publishers such as St. Martins, Watson-Guptil, and Stackpole. He currently holds a tenured position at Emerson College, in Boston in the Dept. of Writing, Literature and Publishing.  We met at his offices there to discuss the histories of four iconic American bookstores: Boston's Old Corner Bookstore, Manhattan's Scribner's Bookstore and Gotham Book Mart, and San Francisco's City Lights. Along the way we meet Ticknor & Fields, Emerson, Thoreau and Hawthorne; Frances Steloff and T.S. Eliot; and on the West Coast, Lawrence Monsanto Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg. Join us for the ride. 

Greg Gibson is the author of four books, including Gone Boy: A Walkabout about the murder of his eighteen-year-old son Galen. After receiving his BA from Swathmore College in 1967, Greg enlisted in the United States navy and worked as a shipfitter until 1971. After his discharge in 1971 he moved to Gloucester, Mass. and worked in a variety of manual jobs until 1976 when he opened Ten Pound Book Company and began his career as an antiquarian book dealer, specializing in nautical books.  This is what we met to discuss at The Boston Antiquarian Book Fair. We tackle Moby Dick, yachting, the growing popularity of ephemera and one of a kind materials, ship logs, letters, sailor's journals & letters, Joshua Slocum, prostitutes, venereal disease, scurvy and much more. 

"Heather O'Donnell grew up in the library stacks and bookstore aisles of suburban Delaware. In 1989, she moved to New York City, where she studied English at Columbia, and held down a series of bookish jobs on the side: working the cash register at the Strand, shelving photobooks in the Avery Library, sifting the slush pile at Grand Street. While writing her doctoral dissertation in the Yale English department, Heather worked as a curatorial assistant at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. In 2004 she left academia to pursue the rare book trade full-time. For seven years, she worked as a bookseller in the New York gallery of Bauman Rare Books. In the fall of 2011, she founded Honey & Wax Booksellers in Brooklyn. In 2017, she and Rebecca Romney established the annual Honey & Wax Book Collecting Prize of $1000 for a young woman book collector." We met at her office early one crisp October morning to talk about all of the above, plus Gertrude Stein, Henry James, completionists, bona fide collectors, publishers' bindings and women reading, the need for unusual distinctive inventory, the way core texts reach wider audiences, apprenticing, James Jaffe, and the valuable contribution collectors make to society. 

Matthew Budman lives in Manhattan with his wife, political theorist Cristina Beltrán, and all the books they can squeeze into their apartment. Budman is the author of Instant Expert: Collecting Books (House of Collectibles), which sold nearly 10,000 copies, and Book Collecting Now: The Value of Print in a Digital Age, published in 2019. It's an engaging guide to building a book collection and celebrates the young, diverse collectors revitalizing what he calls “the world’s greatest pastime.” Among other things, the book examines fundamentals like: identifying first editions, how to get the best deals, understanding the value of autographs, care and repair of books, and the history of publishing and book collecting. We touch on much of this, and New York and white slavery and more, in our conversation, which took place in Matthew's book-lined apartment in Greenwich Village. The bathroom even has a decent selection to choose from!   

Founded in 1884, the Grolier Club is America’s oldest and largest society for bibliophiles and enthusiasts in the graphic arts. Named after Jean Grolier (1489/90-1565), the collector renowned for sharing his library with friends, the Club’s objective is to promote “the study, collecting, and appreciation of books and works on paper.” Through the efforts more than eight hundred members the Club pursues this mission through its library, its public exhibitions and lectures, and its long and distinguished series of publications. I met with Bruce Crawford, the club’s current president (and a collector of Charles Dickens and other 19th-century authors) in the Thomas Phillips room of the Club's headquarters in New York, along with Susan Flamm, who is in charge of P.R. We talk about the Club's history and mission, book collecting, Charles Darwin, minnows, and much more.