The Biblio File hosted by Nigel Beale

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.

Fifteen years ago I interviewed Michael Cader at Book Expo in Toronto. The advice he had for publishers at the time remains remarkably fresh and valuable. Michael is the founder of Publisher's Lunch, the largest book publishing industry publication in the world. Each day it's e-mailed out to more than 45,000 people.

We talk about process, and transparency, extras, the role of a creative person, finding audiences while you're alive, the satisfaction of engaging with an audience, bringing work to the public, enabling public discussion, and more.

William (Bill) Matthews has been dealing in old & rare books, manuscripts, maps and related material since 1976. He began working for a bookshop in Saskatoon, then opened his own in Vancouver in 1976, and subsequently moved to Toronto in 1980. He was in Ontario until 1996 when he moved to San Francisco / Berkeley and was part of Peter Howard's Serendipity Books for a few years. He's now the proud owner of The Haunted Bookshop, a bricks and mortar shop in Sydney, B.C. just north of Victoria. We met in the shop to talk about Bill's career in the used book business, about young collectors; Odean Long, previous long-time owner of The Haunted Bookshop; pseudonymously and anonymously authored books; scouting trips, Acres of Books in Cincinnati, little book fairs, book scouts Martin Stone and David Sachs, Driff's Guide to All the Second-hand and Antiquarian Bookshops in Britain, fantasy fiction, booksellers Peter Howard and Bill Hoffer, the great Winnipeg book sale, Maurice Sendak, and much more. After our conversation Bill and I chatted a bit about Saskatoon, where the two of us had grown up, discovering that we'd both gone to the same high school, at the same time - in the same grade. Bill later produced the yearbook to prove it. Apologies in advance for the poor audio quality (something about soft-spoken booksellers and the acoustics of used bookstores).

Don Stewart is the proprietor of MacLeod's Books at 455 West Pender Street in downtown Vancouver, a shop famed for its magnificent piles of books, wide selection and narrow aisles. Stewart bought MacLeod's Books in 1973 from Van Andruss who'd bought it from Don MacLeod a few years after it opened in 1964. He moved the business into larger premises in 1981 only to see the place burn down the next year - so he had to start again from scratch. Ironically, for the past ten years he's had to contend with Vancouver Fire Department regulations in order just to keep his doors open. Instructed to reduce the number of books in his shop, ​his only options have been to stuff ​things in storage and sell​ as much as he can. Recent zealousness exhibited by the VFD may well be connected in part to the rapaciousness of area developers. Contrary to current rumours the shop will not be closing. I met with Don in the stacks of his shop to talk about his career in bookselling, about homelessness, British Columbia as rich terrain for all manner of book culture, legendary West Coast booksellers Stephen McIntyre and Bill Hoffer, socialism, and anarchy, among other things.