The Biblio File hosted by Nigel Beale

Richard Charkin is a British publishing executive. He founded Mensch Publishing in 2018. Prior to this he was Executive Director of Bloomsbury (2007 to 2018). Over the years he has held executive positions at Pergamon Press, Oxford University Press, and Reed International/Reed Elsevier. He is the former Chief Executive of Macmillan Publishers Limited and Executive Director of Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck.    We met via Zoom to talk about what he's learned over the past several years running Mensch, his tiny publishing firm; specifically we discuss Frankfurt, understanding assets, and measuring various publishing activities in order to save time and money.    * Apologies for the poor audio. Zoom connection was abnormally poor on this one.

Warren Kinsella is a Canadian lawyer, author, musician, political consultant, commentator and sometime painter. He has written for most of Canada's major newspapers and is currently a columnist for the Toronto Sun. He is the founder of the Daisy Consulting Group, a Toronto-based firm that engages in paid political campaign strategy work, lobbying and communications crisis management. Prior to this he played various roles in the Liberal government, including special assistant to Jean Chrétien, former Prime Minister of Canada. He has written ten books, including non-fiction on terrorism, racism, and punk rock, and a novel entitled Party Favours.    We met via Zoom to discuss the political book genre. Topics of conversation included Warren's father Douglas, the types of people who write political books, motivations for writing political books, Chretien's Straight from the Heart, books written pre and post power, books on Justin Trudeau, movies that make you feel shitty, the Canada Council, prime minister biographies and autobiographies, Dick Morris's The New Prince, Marions Antiques in Brighton, Ontario, The Kinsella Diaries, and much more

Steven Heller is an eminent American graphic designer, art director, art critic and scholar.​ He ​has authored or​ co-authored ​more than 200 ​books which variously trace​ the history of typography, illustration and other subjects related to graphic design.​ I talk with Steve here about Alvin Lustig an American American book designer, graphic designer and typeface designer. Some of Lustig's most innovative work was for New Directions, the independent publishing firm. For example, he designed more than seventy iconic dust jackets for the New Classics literature and other series from the mid-40s until his death in 1955. His non-literal designs exuded a modern art sensibility and incorporated a fresh approach to typeface design that defined the New Directions look.    Steve and I met via Zoom to discuss Born Modern: The Life and Design of Alvin Lustig a book he co-wrote with  Elaine Lustig Cohen, Alvin's widow. Among other things we talk about magic shows and magicians, design as sleight of hand, illusions, tactility, Frank Lloyd Wright, hot metal, Constructivism, helicopters, furniture design, Ward Ritchie, New Directions, James Laughlin, expressionistic modernism,  primitive art, catholic church propagandists, soldier's ribbon bars, being close to genius, Alvin's blindness, and Steve's forthcoming memoir Growing up Underground (Princeton Architectural Press, 2022). 

Terry O'Reilly is a Canadian broadcast producer and personality best known for hosting the CBC radio/podcast programs O'Reilly on Advertising, The Age of Persuasion, and Under the Influence, which together have been downloaded more than 40 million times. His  programs examine the cultural and sociological impact of advertising and marketing on modern life. His books include The Age of Persuasion, This I Know, and most recently, My Best Mistakes: Epic Fails and Silver Linings.    We met via Zoom to talk about how to market a book, about knowing the reader, ideas and passions, getting to audiences, finding your readers, all-terrain advertising, social media, podcasts and platforms, communities and fans, authors' marketing activities, trivia and tidbits, free first chapters, reaching out to interviewers, discoverability, bookmarks, visiting bookstores and signing books, speeches, word-of-mouth, interacting on social media, relationships and tone, kindness, dust jacket ideas, book spines, design as narrative, elevator pitches and much more.

Margaret Atwood is a Canadian novelist, essayist, poet, teacher, environmental activist, and inventor. She has written plenty of books, many of them prize-winners. For example, she's won "two Booker Prizes (latest in 2019, co-winner, for The Testaments), the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the Governor General's Award, the Franz Kafka Prize, Princess of Asturias Awards, and the National Book Critics and PEN Center USA Lifetime Achievement Awards." Several of her works, including The Handmaid's Tale, have been adapted for the screen, big and small.   I think of her as a bird. In fact that's how I introduce her - as a cross between an osprey and a magpie. She's partial to phoenixes. We talk about her book Negotiating with the Dead (recently reissued as On Writers and Writing), and about the many reasons why writers write; about writer grants and Shakespeare; appealing to audiences; and geese, totalitarianism and not telling writers what to do; about Dante and bringing stories back from the past; about illuminating the darkness; spiders and witches, compromise, and interviewers hounding authors for interviews. Plus a fair amount more.

Hermione Lee was President of Wolfson College from 2008 to 2017 and is Emeritus Professor of English Literature in the English Faculty at Oxford University. She is a biographer and critic whose work includes biographies of Virginia Woolf (1996), Edith Wharton (2006) and Penelope Fitzgerald (2013, winner of the 2014 James Tait Black Prize for Biography and one of the New York Times best 10 books of 2014). She has also written books on Elizabeth Bowen, Philip Roth and Willa Cather, and a collection of essays on life-writing, Body Parts. In 2003 she was made a CBE and in 2013 she was made a Dame for services to literary scholarship.   We met via Zoom to talk about the what, how and why of biography, and the role of the biographer. During our conversation I reference a book that Hermione wrote in 2009 called Biography: A Very Short Introduction. Topics covered include the practice of autopsy and portraiture; truth and fiction; empathy; conversation; selection and shaping; gossip, privacy and intrusion; the multiplicity of selves and identities; 'definitive' lives; vivid details; anecdotes; obsessional commitment, and detachment; Freud and psychoanalysis; unknowns and gaps; objectivity; Richard Holmes's memoir Footsteps; and Virginia Woolf.

"After working in computer systems analysis for a decade, John Burnside became a full-time writer in 1994. John has published 14 books of poetry, and has won the Geoffrey Faber Prize, the Whitbread Poetry Prize, the Petrarca Preis and, most recently, the Forward and T.S. Eliot Prizes for his poetry. He has also published eight novels and a memoir. He is Professor of English at the University of St Andrews." We met to talk about the what, how and why of poetry as described in his book of criticism The Music of Time. Topics discussed include poetry making nothing happen, poetry making lots happen, paying attention, listening, lightening rods, the sound of the earth, everyday life, elitism, the questions that dog humans, the human name not meaning shit to a tree, connections, LSD and the continuum, dams, killing lawyers, understanding systems and not understanding them, Facebook, the "n" word, compost heaps, Leopardi, Montale, and more...

Jaleen Grove is a Canadian artist and art historian whose area of focus is the history of illustration in the US and Canada. She  teaches at the Rhode Island School of Design, has written monographs on illustrators Oscar Cahén and Walter Haskell Hinton and has served as associate editor for the Journal of Illustration. She is associate editor of the 592-page History of Illustration (Bloomsbury, 2018), and author of a chapter in it entitled 'Avant Garde Illustration 1900-1950' which is the topic of our conversation here, one that incorporates modernism, livres d'artiste, Cubism, Bauhaus; the importance of collecting, preserving and studying ephemera, and more. 

Steven Heller is an eminent American graphic designer, art director, art critic and scholar.​ He ​has authored or​ co-authored ​more than 200 ​books which variously trace​ the history of typography, illustration and other subjects related to graphic design.​ I talk with Steve about Paul Rand an American art director and graphic designer best known for his corporat​e designs which include logos for IBM, UPS, Westinghouse, ​and ​ABC​. ​   Rand was a professor​ of graphic design at Yale University​ ​from 1956​ to 1985​. He once said that of all of his work, he was proudest of his magazine and book covers. Book covers!

Daniel Mendelsohn "is an internationally bestselling author, critic, essayist, and translator. Born in New York City in 1960, he received degrees in Classics from the University of Virginia and Princeton. After completing his Ph.D. he moved to New York City, where he began freelance writing full time; since 1991 he has been a prolific contributor of essays, reviews, and articles to many publications, most frequently The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books." We met via Zoom to discuss the role of the literary critic and how Daniel performs it. We talk about who he is {okay, just part of who he is), what he does, how he does it, and why it's important; about how the critic, by looking behind our reactions, helps us to better understand and appreciate the meaning and significance of a work of art; about critics expressing the intangible and ineffable; the distinction between criticism and opinion; criticism as a service industry; disagreeing with critics; criticism as metaphor; criticism as storytelling; communities of intelligent people; and how really mind-blowing it is that we're all kicking stones around here on a planet that's spinning at some incredible speed moving through a gigantic space that seems devoid of meaning, and we don't know why. Which is why, of course, narrative is so important. It stops us from being scared shitless all of the time. Criticism helps us to figure out how narrative does this. This, and much more.