The Biblio File hosted by Nigel Beale

The Biblio File hosted by Nigel Beale

By Nigel BealeArtsBooksDesign
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The Biblio File hosted by Nigel Beale episodes

  • Roger Chartier on the Study of Book History and its Giants

    Roger Chartier​ was born​ in 1945 in Lyon, ​France. He is a giant in the field of ​book​ history ​and the study of ​publishing and reading.​ He teaches at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, the Collège de France, and the University of Pennsylvania.​ ​

    I interviewed Roger via Zoom in hopes of determining exactly why he's a giant, who's shoulders he stands on, and what he has contributed to the study of book history. Among other things we talk about Roger's book of essays The Author's Hand and the Printer's Mind; Shakespeare and Cervantes; the importance of material texts to history; forms of reading; the codex; translation; intermediaries between the reader and the writer; the commonplace technique; Roland Barthes; reader appropriation; author intention; Marshall McLuhan; D.F. McKenzie's Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts; Robert Darnton; The History of the Book in France; IMEC; maps in fiction; "Sprezzatura​;" ​and literature and the consecration of the life and manuscripts of the writer.

    1 hr 23 min
  • Toby Faber tells the Untold Story of Faber & Faber
    Toby Faber grew up with Faber & Faber - its books and stories have played an important role in his life. He was the company's managing director for four years and remains a non-executive director and chairman of sister company Faber Music. He has written two celebrated works of non-fiction, Stradivarius and Fabergé 's Eggs. His first novel, Close to the Edge, was published by Muswell Press in 2019. He lives in London with his wife and two daughters. We met via Zoom to talk about his book Faber & Faber: The Untold Story. Toby tells the story in the words of those who founded and worked for the company during the 20th century. One of founder Geoffrey Faber (Toby's grandfather)'s great strengths, he says, was recruitment. ​Toby provides me with verbal sketches of many of those recruited to the firm, including T.S. Eliot, Morley Kennerley, Frank Morley, Richard de la Mare, Charles Monteith, Robert McCrum and others. In addition to tracing the history of Faber we look at some of the reasons why it continues to thrive as an independent company, including the fact that, years ago, it chose to maintain control of publishing its own paperback editions of backlist titles.
    1 hr 6 min
  • Emily Powell on dumping Amazon, and the success of her storied Bookstore

    Powell's Books is a chain of bookstores located in and around Portland, Oregon. It claims to be the largest independent new and used bookstore in the world. Powell's 'City of Books' store is located on the edge of downtown and occupies a full city block. It covers some 68,000 square feet or 1.6 acres of retail floor space. Emily Powell is a third generation owner of the bookstore. She made headlines this past August for dumping Amazon as a sales partner. To mark "Independent Bookstore Day" she announced that "we will no longer sell our books on Amazon's marketplace. For too long, we have watched the detrimental impact of Amazon's business on our communities and the independent bookselling world." "The vitality of our neighbors and neighborhoods depends on the ability of local businesses to thrive," she continued. "We will not participate in undermining that vitality."

    I talked to her recently, via Zoom, about her stand against Amazon, her storied bookstore and the reasons for its successes and longevity.

    56 min
  • Tiphaine Guillermou on 20th Century French Book Design

    Tiphaine Guillermou is an editor with Graphéine, a design agency with offices in Paris and Lyon.

    While researching 20th century French book design - so that I'd have some books to hunt down while visiting bookstores in France - I came across a terrific article Tiphaine had written for Graphéine's blog, here. It was exactly what I was looking for - filled with all sorts of great book collecting leads. I was so impressed with the article I decided to interview Tiphaine about it. Listen as we talk about Pierre Faucheux, Robert Massin, Gallimard, Stock, Whites and Yellows, Scorpion, the French Book Club, Le Livre de Poche, Folio, Monsieur Toussaint Louverture, Cent Pages editions,David Pearson, Zulma and much more.

    58 min
  • Andy Hunter on Bookshop.org and how to stick it to Amazon
    Andy Hunter is the founder and CEO of Bookshop.org He's also the publisher at Catapult, at Counterpoint and at Softskull, and, as if this isn't enough, publisher and co-creator at LitHub, and co-founder and chairman at Electric Literature. Despite all of these responsibilities, Andy took the time to talk via Zoom about his latest venture and how to use it to help support indie bookstores, and, at the same time, stick it to Amazon. Bookshop.org is "an online book marketplace designed to support independent bookstores." Among other things the two of us discuss how authors, publishers, reviewers, bloggers and others in the book publishing ecosystem can sign up as Bookshop.org affiliates and make 10% of the price of books sold on their sites (as opposed to 4.5% from Amazon); about Bookshop.org's huge selection of books shipping directly from the wholesaler and being delivered in 2-3 days; about physically touching paper pages and petting cats in brick and mortar bookshops; about the smells and sounds and conversations and coffee that can be had in real bookstores; about revitalizing downtowns; about the magic of reading; and about helping to ensure that all of this continues to be a thing. According to Andy, Bookshop.org will be launching in Canada in the Spring of 2021.
    54 min
  • Benoit Forgeot, one of Paris's Top Rare Book Dealers

    Benoit Forgeot is one of France's leading antiquarian book dealers. We met in his office, in the Odeon district of Paris to talk about what differentiates French collectors from American; French book binders; secrets; coffee; the manuscript market ( good time to buy); Paul Bonet, coffee again; business in Paris versus the provinces; the crucial knowledge that American curators impart, and much more, (includes Parisian street sounds).

    1 hr 1 min
  • Anne-Solange Noble on selling English Language Rights for books published by Gallimard

    Anne-Solange Noble has been International Rights Manager at Gallimard since 1992. She was born and raised in Montreal, Canada and graduated from McGill University in Hispanic Literature. After spending two years in Mexico she went to Paris where she studied International Relations at the Institut d'Études Politiques de Paris. In 1985 she landed a job in rights negotiations with Flammarion. Seven years later she moved to Gallimard to do the same thing, and has been there ever since. Recently her focus has been on licensing English-language rights for Gallimard fiction and non-fiction to American and British publishers. We met at her offices in the Rive Gauche district of Paris to talk about her role, and the obstacles she's faced selling into these English markets over the past three decades.

    1 hr 6 min
  • Bill Samuel on William and Christina Foyle

    Lifted from Bill Samuel's website:

    Itinerant one-time chartered accountant who has lived in Denmark, East Africa, the Gulf (Arabian/Persian, not Texan) and the Caribbean with shorter stints in Eastern Europe and various rather nice small islands. Born in England into a family with an international outlook, an interest in people and a feeling for the cultural side of life. William Foyle, one of the greatest booksellers, and book collectors, of the twentieth century was his grandfather. Bill inherited a passion for books and​ his life ​has largely been ​shaped by those ​he read as a child, which gave ​him a desire to see as much of this wonderful world of ours as​ he could​. ​As for what he's done: ​more or less chronologically: auditing in London and Copenhagen, tourism stuff in Kenya, house building in Portugal, financial consultancy in the UK and the Gulf, Executive Director of an investment bank in Bahrain, Director of Tourism and Superintendent of Offshore Finance in the Turks and Caicos Islands, commercial advisor to the government of St. Helena and Vice Chairman of ​his family business, Foyles bookshop​, which he wrote about in An Accidental Bookseller, A Personal Memoir of Foyles, and which we talk about in this episode of The Biblio File podcast​. We met in the garden of a villa near the town of Condom, in southern France. The weather was perfect.
    1 hr 15 min
  • John Freeman on Lit Hub, Editing, & Interviewing Authors
    John Freeman is an American writer and a literary critic. He was the editor of Granta from 2009 to 2013, and is a former president of the National Book Critics Circle. His writing has appeared in more than 200 English-language publications around the world and he currently edits a series of anthologies of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry entitled Freeman's, published in partnership with Grove/Atlantic and The New School. Reason enough, I figured, to want to talk to him about the role of the editor. His second book, a collection of his interviews with major contemporary writers titled How to Read a Novelist, was published in the U.S. in 2013 by FSG and features profiles of Margaret Atwood, John Updike, Geoff Dyer, Toni Morrison, Haruki Murakami, and others. It's the reason I wanted to talk to him about interviewing authors (plus the fact that I've watched him skillfully question authors on stage - well on Youtube - many times). During his time with the National Book Critics Circle, John launched a campaign to raise awareness of the cutbacks in book coverage by the U.S. national print media and to save book review sections. We talk about how this effort resulted in the establishment of Literary Hub.
    1 hr 20 min
  • Are Libraries ripping off Publishers and Authors? Ken Whyte thinks so

    Kenneth White is the founder of Sutherland House Books. He is the former editor-in-chief of Saturday Night Magazine, the founding editor of The National Post, and the former editor and publisher of Maclean's magazine. He was president of Rogers Publishing, Canada's largest magazine company, and the founding president of Next Issue Canada (now Texture), in partnership with Conde Nast, Meredith, Hearst, and Time Inc. Mr. Whyte is the author of The Uncrowned King: The Sensational Rise of William Randolph Hearst (2008, Random House), In 2017, he published Hoover: An Extraordinary Life in Extraordinary Times (Knopf), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

    Last month he launched a suicidal assault on libraries in a 3500-word article in The Globe and Mail newspaper. In it he posits, among other things, that: there are three times as many books borrowed as bought in the United States every year, and four times as many in Canada; that libraries don't passively lend books, they compete with booksellers by advertising how much people can save by borrowing rather than buying books, and they compete among themselves to lend the most books possible; and that most public library lending is of books read for entertainment, not edification, by people who can afford to pay for books.

    We talked about his article via Zoom.

    57 min

About The Biblio File hosted by Nigel Beale

From the publisher's feed

THE BIBLIO FILE is a podcast about "the book," and an inquiry into the wider world of book culture. Hosted by Nigel Beale it features wide ranging, long-form conversations with authors, poets, book…