The Biblio File hosted by Nigel Beale

In which I talk, in rather rushed fashion, to great Canadian author and "bad" feminist Margaret Atwood about literary tourism: 'place' and her novel MaddAddam, Harvard and The Handmaid's Tale, and the Kingston Penitentiary and Alias Grace, also the real and the imaginary, the unreliability of eye witnesses, following the research, Samuel Johnson, Ernest Hemingway, food and underclothing, bodies, space and smell, plus the importance of plumbing. 

November 30, 2017 marked the 350th anniversary of the birth of one the world's great satirists, Jonathan Swift. To honour the occasion I thought it would be fitting to interview an expert on humour, in this, the age of Trump. So I met recently with Maggie Hennefeld, Assistant Professor of Cultural Studies & Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota, in Minneapolis. We discuss her article Laughter in the Age of Trump that appeared in Flow an online journal of television and media studies. 

Scott Griffin, (born 1938) is a Canadian businessman and philanthropist best known for founding the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2000, one of the world's most generous poetry awards, and 'Poetry In Voice', a bilingual recitation competition for Canadian high schools.  Griffin is chairman, director and majority shareholder since 2002 of House of Anansi Press/Groundwood Books, and Chancellor of Bishop's University. In 2006, Griffin published a memoir entitled My Heart Is Africa that recounted his two-year aviation adventure starting in 1996, working for the Flying Doctors Service in Africa. All royalties from the sale of the book are donated to the AMREF Flying Doctors Service. The book was named to the Globe and Mail top 100 for 2006. We talk about his childhood and time in boarding school, clouds, flying, comparing horses to planes, overcoming fears and breaking away to do something different with your life for a time, calculated risk, the African Medical and Research Foundation (AMREF), the humanity of Africa, the venture capital business, magnesium die-casting, sharing experiences and providing space.   

I met with publisher Simon Dardick at his home office in Montreal to talk about the history and collecting of his long-running literary publishing house Vehicule Press. 

Glenn Dixon has published two books. Pilgrim in the Palace of Words: A journey through the 6000 languages of Earth was published in 2009 to rave reviews.  His second, Tripping the World Fantastic: A journey through the music of our planet came out in April of 2013.  He has also published travel articles and cultural pieces in major publications such as National Geographic Magazine, the New York Post, the Walrus Magazine, the Globe and Mail and even Psychology Today.  Glenn has traveled through seventy countries and worked on documentary films in Egypt, Tibet, Russia, Peru, Ecuador, Turkey and many others. He has three degrees including a Masters degree in socio-linguistics.  He lives and works in Calgary, Canada.  

Marcello Di Cintio is a Canadian writer. He won the 2012 Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing for his book Walls: Travels Along the Barricades. The award was handed out on March 6, 2013 at the Writers' Trust of Canada's annual Politics and the Pen in Ottawa. Marcello was born in Calgary, Alberta where he currently lives with his wife, Moonira, and son, Amedeo. We met recently to discuss his literary pilgrimage to Iran, which he wrote about in his book, Poets and Pahlevans, a Journey into the Heart of Iran. 

Rae Armantrout is an American poet generally associated with Language Poets. Armantrout was born in Vallejo, California but grew up in San Diego. She has published more than 10 books of poetry and has also been featured in a number of major anthologies. Armantrout teaches at the University of California, San Diego, where she is Professor of Poetry and Poetics. Armantrout was awarded the 2009 National Book Critics Circle Award for her collection of poetry Versed, published by the Wesleyan University Press. The book later earned the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Armantrout’s collection, Just Saying, was published in 2013. She is the recipient of numerous other awards for her poetry including an award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts in 2007 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2008. We met in Ottawa to discuss her poetry, William Carlos Williams, place, and how to be a literary tourist in San Diego. 

The Press & Letterfoundry of Michael & Winifred Bixler is "devoted to the craft of fine letterpress printing and traditional book typography. Our extensive collection of English Monotype matrices allows us to cast from 8- to 72-point, classic book typefaces including Bembo, Dante, Walbaum, Van Dijck, Joanna, Perpetua, Garamond, Centaur & Arrighi, Ehrhardt, Fournier, Bell, Baskerville, Poliphilus, Plantin, Gill Sans, & Univers. Work is designed, set, printed, & bound in our shop. We use Vandercook & Heidelberg cylinder presses. Fonts are cast on commission & sold by the pound." I met with Michael and Winifred at their shop in Skaneateles, NY to discuss letterpress printing, and all things Monotype. 

I met with David Mason in Kingston to talk about his memoir The Pope's Bookbinder. As the Biblioasis website wordsmiths have it: "From his drug-hazy, book-happy years near the Beat Hotel in Paris and throughout his career as antiquarian book dealer, David Mason brings us a storied life. He discovers his love of literature in a bathtub at age eleven, thumbing through stacks of lurid Signet paperbacks. At fifteen he’s expelled from school. For the next decade and a half, he will work odd jobs, buck all authority, buy books more often than food, and float around Europe. He’ll help gild a volume in white morocco for Pope John XXIII. And then, at the age of 30, after returning home to Canada and apprenticing with Joseph Patrick Books, David Mason will find his calling." "David Mason boldly campaigns for what he feels is the moral duty of the antiquarian trade: to preserve the history and traditions of all nations, and to assert without compromise that such histories have value.  The Pope's Bookbinder is an engrossing memoir by a giant in the book trade—whose infectious enthusiasm, human insight, commercial shrewdness, and deadpan humour will delight bibliophiles for decades to come. "  

Matthew Tree (born December 30, 1958) is a writer in English and Catalan. He has lived in Barcelona since 1984. Apart from publishing both fiction and non-fiction, he is a contributor to various newspapers and magazines such as Catalonia Today,The Times Literary Supplement, Barcelona INK, Altaïr, El Punt Avui and L'Esguard. He has also appeared on various Catalan language radio and TV stations and is current a monthly guest on Catalunya Ràdio's chat show L'Oracle. In 2005 and 2006 he scripted and presented two series of the infotainment programme Passatgers for TV3 (Catalan Public Television). His most recent book, a novel in English, is entitled Snug. It's about a small village in the Isle of Wight which finds itself under siege by Africans who have gone there for that very purpose. I caught up with Matthew recently, on a blustery afternoon, to talk about cool literary things to do while in Barcelona.