The Biblio File hosted by Nigel Beale

A specialist in Canadian publishing history, Janet B. Friskney, is the author of New Canadian Library: The Ross-McClelland Years, 1952-1978 (published by the University of Toronto Press). Her publication credits include articles on the Methodist Book and Publishing House of Toronto, nineteenth-century Bible and tract society activity in Canada, and the history of publishing for the blind in Canada. She served as Associate Editor to Volume 3 of the History of the Book in Canada, and edited and introduced Thirty Years of Storytelling: Selected Short Fiction by Ethelwyn Wetherald.  We met at Carleton University to discuss the history and evolution of McClelland & Stewart's New Canadian Library (NCL) reprint series. Topics covered include the relationship between Jack McClelland and Malcolm Ross, selection criteria, the commerce of publishing a reprint series, teaching Canadian novels in Canadian universities, the ambivalent nature of introductions used to accompany some NCL titles, book designer Frank Newfeld, Canada's literary heritage, and the current status of the NCL. 

Chester Gryski holds a B. A. (Hons) in Political Science and Economics from the University of Toronto and a J. D. from Osgoode Hall Law School of York University. He was called to the Ontario bar in 1976. He has acted for MPAC and its predecessor assessing authorities since 1976. In those 40 years, he has dealt with all types of properties and all issues with a particular emphasis on industrial properties and contaminated lands. Outside of his legal practice he is an ex officio Director of the Alcuin Society of Canada and a renowned collector of Canadian fine press printing which is why he is on the Biblio File podcast. We met at his home just outside of Kingston, Ontario to talk, among other things, about how to evaluate fine press printing, Canadian book designer and typographer Glenn Goluska, Ryerson College printing and design teacher Denis Milton, the English private press tradition, the Grimsby Wayzgoose, Will Reuter, the Barbarian Press, the Heavenly Monkey Press, Jason Dewinetz, Margaret Lock, Robert Reid, Jim Rimmer, bibliographies, why we collect, and much more. 

Daniel Woolf is a British/Canadian historian. He served as the 20th Principal and Vice-Chancellor of Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario from September, 2009 to June, 2019, when he returned to teaching and research. He was previously Professor, Department of History and Classics at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, where he also served as Dean of the Faculty of Arts.  He studied history at Queen's and Oxford Universities, and is the author of many books, including The Oxford History of Historical Writing, (general editor), 5 vols, (Oxford University Press, 2011–12) and most recently, A Concise History of History, (Cambridge University press, 2019). Most important to our purposes, he's also a book collector, specializing in 15th-18th century histories. We met at his home near Kingston, Ontario, to talk about, among other things, the evolution of his collection, the poet Ben Johnson, wedding anniversaries, antiquarian books, tythes and local histories, book historian Jonathan Rose, 'things not kings', maps, abebooks and biblio.com, historiography and the history of history, Chronicles, Attic Books, the Schulich-Woolf Rare Book Collection, going cold turkey, and the domestic police.  

John Ivison is a Scottish Canadian journalist who is Ottawa Bureau Chief for the National Post. Raised in Dumfries, Scotland, he worked as a reporter for The Scotsman newspaper in Edinburgh and as deputy business editor of Scotland on Sunday. He was educated at the University of Glasgow, McMaster University and the University of Western Ontario, where he earned a masters degree in Journalism. He moved to Canada in 1998 as part of the team that launched the National Post, and has covered provincial politics in Ontario and federal politics in Ottawa since 2003. He appears as a panelist on various Canadian TV public affairs programs and is the author of Trudeau: The Education of a Prime Minister (2019), a biography of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau that focuses on his government's promise-filled first mandate. Ivison is married to Canadian diplomat Dana Cryderman, and has three children. Together they have taught him 'how to be content.' I want to be content, so my initial questions deal with this topic. We then discuss John's moves back and forth between Scotland and Canada, shuffle on to the story of the book itself, and then on to Trudeau and the lessons he may or may not have learned during his tenure in office. I raise the topic of the Post's right wing board of directors, and throw in some of John's humour and political wisdom, and we close with an examination of truth, and whether or not Canadians can trust Justin Trudeau.

This past summer Meghan O’Rourke was appointed editor of The Yale Review. In an award citation the Whiting Foundation praised her “far-reaching and ambitious” work, and noted that her “voice stands out for its power and originality.” She is the author of the memoir The Long Goodbye (2011) and the poetry collections Once (2011), Halflife (2007), and Sun In Days (2017), which The New York Times named one of the 10 Best Poetry Books of the year. Her essays and poems have appeared in magazines such as The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, and Poetry. She has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Radcliffe Fellowship, a Whiting Award, a Lannan fellowship, two Pushcart Prizes, the May Sarton Poetry Prize, the Union League Prize from the Poetry Foundation, and a Front Page Award for her cultural criticism. She has taught at New York University, Princeton, and The New School, and is currently completing a book about chronic illness. I met with Meghan in her new, bare-walled office in New Haven. It was her very first day on the job, working in the office that is. Among other things we talked about the history of The Yale Review, bridging disciplines, current events, criticism, the Paris Review in its heyday, magazines as spawning grounds for books, re-designs; private experiences with print and the pleasures of being immersed in reading; book designer Chip Kidd; Pentagram; book collecting, broadsides, and much more. 

Sandra Campbell, a graduate of Carleton and Ottawa Universities, specializes in Canadian and Caribbean (Bermuda) women’s writing, in particular for the period 1880-1940. She has a particular interest in women’s autobiography as well as gender, and the publishing industry. Professor Campbell has taught at Carleton, the University of Ottawa and McGill University, and as a Visiting Lecturer at Bermuda College. She is the author of numerous articles and co-editor of three anthologies of short fiction by Canadian women writers.  We met a her home in Kingston, Ontario to talk about Both Hands, her biography of one of Canada's greatest publishers, Lorne Pierce (1890-1961) of Ryerson Press. 

Michel Gauthier has enjoyed a distinguished career in the field of festival events, tourism and recreation. He was instrumental in coordinating the participation of HRH Princess Margriet of the Netherlands in the 50th Anniversary Celebrations of the Canadian Tulip Festival, an organization that he managed from 1992 - 2005. This flagship event draws millions of visitors from all over the world each spring to Canada’s capital city. From 1984-1988 he was Executive Director of Winterlude, another of Ottawa's popular festivals. Over the years he has also been active in many national and international associations. He is currently Executive Director of the Canadian Garden Council. Michel holds a Festival Director Certificate from Perdue University and a Recreation Diploma from Algonquin College. I met with him at his home, in his library, to discuss not festivals or tulips, but his other grand passion, photography books. Among other things we talk about nudes, limited editions, black and white contrast, his mother's photo albums, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Richard Avedon, Edward Steichen, Helmut Newton, The Beatles, Patti Smith and travelling the world visiting exotic bookshops, and connecting with booksellers and great photographers.  

"In 1989, Scott deWolfe began selling Shaker books, ephemera, photographs and manuscripts. Frank Wood had been selling used and rare books since the 1970s. Both worked for the Sabbathday Shaker Community in Maine. When the two realized they would make good business partners, they started doing shows together in 1990. Two years later, during a snow storm on April Fool's Day, the doors to De Wolfe & Wood opened for the first time." I met with the two of them at their store in Alfred, Maine to take up the story from here. 

Earlier this year the Beinecke Library hosted an exhibition entitled Bibliomania; or Book Madness: A Bibliographical Romance. It takes its name from the history of “arrant book-lovers” written by Thomas Frognall Dibdin. "It follows these lovers of the book through four case studies, observing the powerful and often unexpected relationships of books with their readers, owners, authors, collectors, and creators." "Every Book in the World! explores the passionate collecting and printing history of the legendary nineteenth-century bibliomaniac Thomas Phillipps, whose vast collection of manuscripts and early printed books filled an English country house and required more than a century of public auctions and sales to disperse." I met with curators Ray Clemens and Diane Ducharme to talk about Phillipps, his family, his temperament, his ambition, the scope of his collection, and of course, his obsessive, destructive collecting habit. 

John Sawatsky is a Canadian author, journalist and interviewing consultant. Born in Winkler, Manitoba, he attended Simon Fraser University in the late 1960s graduating in political science. He started his career as an investigative reporter in the 1970s. While working as Ottawa correspondent for the Vancouver Sun he published a series of articles on misdeeds of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, for which he received the 1976 Michener Award. He left daily journalism in 1979 to write books, among them a biography of Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney published 1991.  In 1982, Sawatsky began teaching classes in investigative journalism and has been an adjunct professor of journalism at Carleton University's School of Journalism since 1991. Sawatsky also works as a consultant in the practice of interviewing and has taught interviewing techniques to television anchors, reporters and print journalists in many parts of the world, including Canada, Singapore, The United States, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. He currently teaches an interview-technique seminar for sports reporters at ESPN. The seminar focuses on remedying "the sloppy and ineffective interviewing techniques often employed by many of today's major television and cable news interviewers". In 2004, he was hired full-time by ESPN as senior director of talent development. We met at his home in Connecticut where I tried to discover from him how best to interview an author. During our conversation we talk about the merits of having an opinion, the positives and negatives of disagreeing with your guests and/or letting them shine, micro and macro interviewing strategies, open and close ended questions, football play-books, Howard Stern, David Letterman, Jay Leno and Johnny Carson.