The Biblio File hosted by Nigel Beale

Iain Stevenson has worked with Longman, Macmillan, Pinter, Leicester University Press, Wiley, and The Stationery Office.  In 1986 he founded the environmental publisher Belhaven Press. He created the award winning MA in Publishing Studies at City University London and was a Professor in the Department of Journalism and Publishing there between 1999 and 2006. He is active on the governing and advisory board of the Publishers Association. Current research is centred upon the history of British publishing and the applications of new technology in publishing, especially e-books and alternatives to the printed monograph in academic and scholarly communication.  We met at his offices (which occasionally sound as if they're under siege) to talk about his excellent new book, Book Makers: British Publishing in the Twentieth Century, published by British Library.    

Alexander MacLeod was born in Inverness, Cape Breton and raised in Windsor, Ontario. His award-winning stories have appeared in a variety of leading journals, some have been selected for The Journey Prize Anthology. He holds degrees from the University of Windsor, the University of Notre Dame, and McGill. He currently lives in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia and teaches at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax. Light Lifting, his first book, a collection of short stories, has been shortlisted for Canada's Giller Prize. We met to discuss the work, specifically 'Miracle Mile', the collection's first story. Our conversation touches on technique and themes, the search for significance and meaning, disciplines, how, why and what people care about, and the use of metaphor and pace. Alexander MacLeod photo by Heather Crosby. 

Previously managing director of Faber and Faber, Toby Faber is now a non-executive director of the firm and Chairman of its sister company Faber Music. An author in his own right, Faber has written two books Fabergé's Eggs and Stradivari’s Genius: Five Violins, One Cello, and Three Centuries of Enduring Perfection, both successful, neither of them published by Faber. Born in Cambridge, England, in 1965, he lives in London with his wife and daughter. We met to talk about his family's renowned publishing firm, its history and how interested parties might best go about collecting its publications. Our conversation took place at Faber HQ in London, specifically at the same table Toby's grandfather Geoffrey frequently sat at years ago with T.S. Eliot, Richard de la Mare and other iconic members of the Faber 'family.'  

Frank Newfeld is a Canadian book designer, illustrator, art director and educator. He has designed over 650 books and won more than 170 Canadian and international awards,  is a former Vice-President of Publishing at McClelland & Stewart and  Head of the Illustration Program at Sheridan College,  and Co-founder of the Society of Graphic Designers of Canada Newfeld has written and designed three children’s books, two of them published by Oxford University Press and one by Groundwood Books (Douglas & McIntyre). In 2008 his memoir  Drawing on Type was published by Porcupine’s Quill. We talk here about the origins of his career as a book designer and illustrator, about some of his innovations, about the books he considers his best, and about which of his titles the collector might fruitfully pursue.  

  Robert Baldock started working at Yale University Press in London as a history editor in 1985. After serving as editorial director of the publisher’s humanities division, and deputy m.d.,   he was promoted to Managing Director in 2004. His authors on the biography, history, politics, music and religion lists have included Roy Porter, Richard Evans and Diarmuid MacCulloch. Prior to Yale he worked at Weidenfeld & Nicolson and the Harvester Press. We talk here about his predecessor John Nicol, a brilliant editor and designer who developed Yale’s art and architecture list, Nicol’s triumph Life in the English Country House; about Yale’s partnerships with the world’s great galleries and museums, its hands-on approach to production, E.H.Gombrich’s A Little History of the World (400,000 copies sold, and counting), Strawberry Hill and the Lewis Walpole Library in Connecticut, the Yale series of Younger Poets, the Annals of Communism series, and architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner’s famous guides.  

Michael Winship is a bibliographer and historian of the book – with special expertise in pre-1940 American publishing and book trade history.  He edited and completed the final three volumes of Bibliography of American Literature, for which he received the bibliography prize of the International League of Antiquarian Booksellers, and served as an editor of and contributor to the recently completed 5-volume A History of the Book in America. We talk here, on a windy day (hence the background static)  in Haaavud Yaaaad about collecting books published by Ticknor and Fields, later Houghton Mifflin.   The best book published by Ticknor and Fields: Life of William Hickling Prescott, by George Ticknor (1864)  

Carl Spadoni is the former Director of the William Ready Division of Archives and Research Collections, McMaster University Library.  In 1999, he was awarded the Marie Tremaine Medal by the Bibliographical Society of Canada for outstanding service to Canadian bibliography and for distinguished publication. He is the author of seven books including the Bibliography of McClelland and Stewart Ltd. Imprints, 1909-1985 (with Judy Donnelly). We met during the summer, in Hamilton, to talk about the history of M&S and which books and series from this venerable Canadian publishing house, might be worth collecting.  

Ruth Panofsky is Professor of English at Ryerson University in Toronto where she specializes in Canadian Literature and Culture, focusing on Canadian authorship and publishing history. She is the author of The Force of Vocation: The Literary Career of Adele Wiseman and is currently preparing a SSHRC-funded history of the Macmillan Company of Canada, 1905-1986. We met this past summer in Toronto to talk about Macmillan, its history and some of the more important books and authors it has published.    

Richard Virr was the Head and Curator of Manuscripts at the Rare Books and Special Collections Division of the McGill University Library. We met  in Montreal to talk about book collecting, characteristic traits of the book collector, and different kinds of collections, including the Stone and Kimball collection that was purchased by McGill in 1972. It holds most of the books published by Stone & Kimball (1893-1897) of Cambridge, Chicago and New York, a publisher important primarily because of its focus on book quality and design. 

W. McAllister (Mac) Johnson is a retired professor of art history at the University of Toronto. Some years ago he donated his collection of close to 1000 scholarly, art historical titles to the Carleton University Library in Ottawa.  The collection is unusual in that it was assembled not by titles, but by categories of art-historical scholarship, including works on provenance and association; technical and theoretical works; museum, exhibition, and auction catalogues; translations and re-editions; connoisseurship (attribution) and criticism; reference works and ephemera. Together the books offer insights into the intellectual, institutional, social, and commercial activity of the art world in France and other European countries in the period spanning the Renaissance to the 20th century. Johnson, an American-born art historian of international repute,  taught at the University of Toronto, where he trained two generations of Canadian scholars and curators, as a professor of Art History. The library he has donated to Carleton University represents the material evidence of his scholarly activities over the past four decades. We met to talk about some of the practical approaches, philosophies and joys of collecting.