The Biblio File hosted by Nigel Beale cover image

The Biblio File hosted by Nigel Beale

Latest episodes

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Feb 25, 2019 • 1h 10min

Novelist Heather O'Neill on Fathers, #metoo, Class, Beauty and Roses

HEATHER O’NEILL is a novelist, short-story writer and essayist. Her work, which includes Lullabies for Little Criminals, The Girl Who Was Saturday Night and Daydreams of Angels, has been shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, the Orange Prize for Fiction and the Scotiabank Giller Prize in two consecutive years, and has won CBC Canada Reads, the Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction and the Danuta Gleed Award. Born and raised in Montreal, O’Neill lives there today with her daughter. And it's there that I met with her to discuss her 2017 CLC Kreisel Lecture published in 2018 by The University of Alberta Press as Wisdom in Nonsense - Invaluable Lessons From My Father. Among other things we talk about hating and loving your life, happiness and wonder, relationships with your parents dead and alive, memoirs versus fiction, truth, abuse and #metoo and witnesses, the legal system and power, Concordia, lying to tell the truth, editing the real world, heads being eaten off by dragons, magical radical worlds, deception versus folly, pretending, class, ignoring fathers' advice, metaphors, loneliness, ugly babies, conventional versus internal beauty, clowns, collecting, stealing cheese, Montreal's Plateau neighbourhood, and roses. 
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Feb 18, 2019 • 1h 5min

Prof. Katharine Streip on The Odyssey, Quentin Tarantino, and the Wine Blue Sea

Katharine Streip received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of California at Berkeley. She has published essays on Marcel Proust, Jean Rhys, Philip Roth, and William S. Burroughs. Her research interests include comedy, the novel, 19th c. Paris and modernism. I'm sitting in on some of her classes at Concordia University's Liberal Arts College, which offers "a unique Great Books, multidisciplinary Core Curriculum designed to provide the foundations of an education for life." Here, as part of The Biblio File Book Club, we discuss Homer's Odyssey, and with it topics including revenge, Quentin Tarantino, home and family, identity, the slaughter of suitors, the craving for experience, the desire to learn, curiosity, intelligence, problem solving, Penelope, gifts, the practice of hospitality, sacred strangers, recklessness, repetition in texts, double standards, suspicion, character arcs, women as betrayers, and the "wine blue" sea.  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.
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Feb 11, 2019 • 48min

Sophie Schneideman on Fine and Private Press Books

Sophie Schneideman has been an international rare book and print dealer for over 28 years, serving a long apprenticeship at Maggs Bros, an eminent book firm in Mayfair, and dealing as Sophie Schneideman Rare Books since 2007. She specializes in several areas of book collecting, the main focus being the Art of the Book, i.e. book illustration, private presses, fine binding, fine printing and livres d’artistes, particularly of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This includes prints and books by important illustrators, photographers and graphic artists. We met at her London studio and talked about dealing with beautiful things, starting a business, 'running' books, sniffing around and meeting people, having an international mindset, the best bookfairs, researching and cataloguing beautiful books and getting stories out of them, selling what you love, the Golden Cockerel Press, Doves Press, always buying the best copy, ephemera, trophy hunters, book collecting prizes, imperfections, the Ashendene Press, Cobden-Sanderson, books, harmony and the cosmos, the Kelmscott Press, the Nonesuch Press, limitations and rarity, the Folio Society, the Limited Editions Club, Gaylord Schanilec, Ron King at the Circle Press, and the Old School Press. 
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Feb 4, 2019 • 36min

Henry Hitchings on the world in Bookshops

Henry Hitchings is an author, reviewer and critic, specializing in narrative non-fiction, with a particular emphasis on language and cultural history. His second book, The Secret Life of Words: How English Became English, won the 2008 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. He is the president of the Johnson Society of Lichfield. As of 2018, he is chair of the drama section of the UK's Critics' Circle. He was a King's Scholar at Eton College before going to Christ Church, Oxford, and then to University College London to research his PhD on Samuel Johnson. In 2016 Hitchings edited a collection of original essays about bookshops, entitled Browse: The World in Bookshops. Its contributors included Alaa Al Aswany, Stefano Benni, Michael Dirda, Daniel Kehlmann, Andrey Kurkov, Yiyun Li, Pankaj Mishra, Dorthe Nors, Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor, Ian Sansom, Elif Shafak, Iain Sinclair, Ali Smith, Sasa Stanisic and Juan Gabriel Vasquez. We met in London to talk about Browse, and our experiences in bookstores around the world. 
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Feb 1, 2019 • 43min

Canada Council on changes to its literary book publishing grant program

I met with members of the Canada Council's Supporting Artistic Practice Program team last month to discuss changes made in 2017 to the literary book publishing grant program. Among other things we talk about the fact that programs are designed to benefit all Canadians, about phases in the spectrum of activities in artistic creation, supporting writers versus book production, professional development for arts professionals, new opportunities for literary publishers to get funding, the digital strategy fund, whether or not publishing is an artistic endeavour, literary non-fiction, Ken Whyte and Procupine's Quill, filling in profiles, project grants, core support and juries.  * Please note that Guylaine Normandin is no longer with the Canada Council.  
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Jan 28, 2019 • 45min

Nigel Roby on The Bookseller magazine

The Bookseller is a British magazine reporting news on the publishing industry. In 2010 it was acquired from Nielsen by its then Managing Director, Nigel Roby, who is now Chief Executive, Owner and Publisher of the new, expanded entity.  I met with Nigel at The Bookseller's offices across the Thames from the Houses of Parliament, in London. Among other things we talk about the history and purpose of The Bookseller and its related enterprises; telling the trade about new books, informing rivals about their competitors' releases; quasi-catalogues; the Blitz; libraries under pressure; Waterstones; Mr. B's, Toppings and high streets; Tim Waterstones's new memoir; Blackwell's; the leveling off of e-book sales and the production value of print books; subscription book clubs; and click and collect...plus we mull over some of the hotter topics that today face the book publishing and selling world.  
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Jan 14, 2019 • 1h 19min

James Daunt on the Turnaround at Waterstones

James Daunt is Managing Director of the Waterstones chain of bookstores in England. Has been since 2011. We met at the Piccadilly store in London to talk about, among other things, J.P. Morgan, New York, silver spoons and begging bowls, genuine passion, store energy, author event programs, bookshops as social places, a core of regular customers, identifying up-and-coming writers, booksellers who read, booksellers who treat publishers with suspicion, Waterstones not selling shelf-space, caring enthusiasm, shocking and fabulous bookshops, plastic flowers, bookseller personality, how to display books, book-selling being visual, recommending books (never more than three), Brexit, Amazon, screwing with algorithms, slippery squid, freedom to price, the perceived value of books, pre-orders, employee uniforms, changing chains, the purpose of chain bookshops, Indigo Books, introverted booksellers, poor writers, curating books, raising bookseller staff salaries, making Waterstones more like Daunt Books, returns as a measure of bad buying, dropping the apostrophe in Waterstones,  demystifying Kindle, holding entertaining events, and being a fun place in the community.
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Jan 7, 2019 • 1h 10min

Stephen Page, CEO at Faber in dialogue with founder Geoffrey

Stephen Page is the Chief Executive Officer at Faber & Faber.  We met at his offices in Bloomsbury, London, and invited Geoffrey Faber into the room. The three of us talk, among other things, about publishers being a race apart, comets, the unevenness of publishing, the low barriers to entry, maintaining humility, Paul Hamlyn, colour books and technological breakthroughs, the elasticity of books,  e-books and the beauty of analogue, reading and shopping environments, seduction and hand-crafted books, millennials and the book as object, the Mainstreet Trading bookshop, starting the process of getting people to read a book, Milkman and the difference between originality and difficulty, "legacy" businesses, trust and relationships, providing value to writers, the 'ff' colophon and cultural value, CATS, risk and editorial impulse, Kazuo Ishiguro and honouring authors now, sales and realism, superlatives, copy and honesty, formats and creating energy, design briefs, Woody Allen, the vocation of publishing, the gift of social media, advertising, James Daunt, Waterstones, independents and Amazon, The Doves Press, and books as a life-blood of civilized humanity.   
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Jan 2, 2019 • 1h 10min

Will Atkinson on book publishing, the role of Sales and Marketing, and Fluff

Will Atkinson is Managing Director of Atlantic Books, U.K. Prior to this he was, for many years, with Faber & Faber, serving as Director of Sales & Marketing from 2006 to 2014. During this time he spearheaded the Independent Alliance, a very successful sales organization that comprises some of the U.K.'s leading independent publishers, including Granta and Canongate.  I met with Will at his offices in Bloomsbury, London. We talk here, among other things, about the Alliance (Faber, Canongate, Granta, Querus, Profile, Atlantic, Short Books, & Icon), access to book buyers, Steig Larsen, must-have books, faith and trust, selling books abroad, being misquoted, brands, car-dealerships, Waterstones' golden era, Michael Joseph, grounding, classic sales people, enthusiasm, libraries, T.S. Eliot, catalogues, book wholesalers, Gardners Books, Amazon, Call me by Your Name, the Net Book Agreement, Harry Potter, best-sellers and over-publishing, big data, the law of threes, publishing popular people, social media, Rome by Matthew Neale and fluff.
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Dec 24, 2018 • 48min

Hannah Knowles on the role of the commissioning editor

Hannah Knowles, Senior Commissioning Editor at Canongate Books in London, tells me what she does. I question her with the help of Geoffrey Faber. We talk, among others things, about track records, The Beautiful Poetry of Donald Trump, books with legs, back-lists, bestsellers, Robert Webb's How Not to be a Boy, selling rights internationally, inclusive lists, illustrated books, the right length of a book, redundant and obscure passages, the first 50 pages, popular culture, being on the writer's side, auctions, lizards and sex in Cold Skin, Rob Sears, libel, parody, the wallpaper in Canongate's London boardroom, editorial and acquisition meetings, florid style, the best literary agents, great works seeing the light of day, idealism, Tom Jones's Tired of London, Tired of Life, Gina Miller's Rise, people who live their lives for the good of others, advances (a slightly irritating and discursive diversion), I Go Quiet by David Ouimet, and the power of books to show us all that we have a place in the world. 

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