The Biblio File hosted by Nigel Beale

George Andreou was appointed director of the Harvard University Press (HUP) in September, 2017 replacing William P. Sisler who had been in the position for some 27 years.

Born in New York, Andreou spent much of his early childhood in Greece. He graduated from Harvard College in 1987 with a degree in English literature and languages. Prior to coming to Harvard he was senior editor and vice president at Alfred A. Knopf where he founded Vintage Español, an imprint created to publish books in Spanish for the U.S. market. Over the years he edited the works of many impressive writers, including John Ashbery, Junot Díaz, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Sonia Sotomayor, and the Nobel laureates V.S. Naipaul and Orhan Pamuk.

I sat down with George recently at his HUP offices in Cambridge, MA, to discuss, among other things, the practice of reading; the role of the editor; the temporality of writing, "what to say, what not to say, and when;" reading books at the right time; editors becoming publishers, the differences between university and trade publishing; peer review; book design; and Thomas Piketty's new book Capital and Ideology.

David Emblidge spent his childhood in Buffalo, New York and "on the sunny beaches of Ontario's Lake Erie." After university he worked at the Associated Press as a reporter covering everything from the "disappearance of rural doctors to hog futures, and one murder."

Before entering the publishing trade as a second career he spent ten rewarding years as a professor following on degrees in English (Univ. of Virginia) and American Studies (Univ. of Minnesota).

He worked in publishing for nearly twenty-five years – as acquisitions editor, book packager, publishing consultant, editor in chief, and publisher. The houses: Harvard University Press, Cambridge University Press, Continuum, The Mountaineers Books. He founded Berkshire House Publishers (travel, regional literature and history, food), and eventually sold it to WW Norton. As a book packager, he produced multi-volume series on various subjects for major trade book publishers such as St. Martins, Watson-Guptil, and Stackpole.

He currently holds a tenured position at Emerson College, in Boston in the Dept. of Writing, Literature and Publishing. We met at his offices there to discuss the histories of four iconic American bookstores: Boston's Old Corner Bookstore, Manhattan's Scribner's Bookstore and Gotham Book Mart, and San Francisco's City Lights. Along the way we meet Ticknor & Fields, Emerson, Thoreau and Hawthorne; Frances Steloff and T.S. Eliot; and on the West Coast, Lawrence Monsanto Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg. Join us for the ride.

Greg Gibson is the author of four books, including Gone Boy: A Walkabout about the murder of his eighteen-year-old son Galen. After receiving his BA from Swathmore College in 1967, Greg enlisted in the United States navy and worked as a shipfitter until 1971. After his discharge in 1971 he moved to Gloucester, Mass. and worked in a variety of manual jobs until 1976 when he opened Ten Pound Book Company and began his career as an antiquarian book dealer, specializing in nautical books.

This is what we met to discuss at The Boston Antiquarian Book Fair. We tackle Moby Dick, yachting, the growing popularity of ephemera and one of a kind materials, ship logs, letters, sailor's journals & letters, Joshua Slocum, prostitutes, venereal disease, scurvy and much more.

"Heather O'Donnell grew up in the library stacks and bookstore aisles of suburban Delaware. In 1989, she moved to New York City, where she studied English at Columbia, and held down a series of bookish jobs on the side: working the cash register at the Strand, shelving photobooks in the Avery Library, sifting the slush pile at Grand Street. While writing her doctoral dissertation in the Yale English department, Heather worked as a curatorial assistant at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. In 2004 she left academia to pursue the rare book trade full-time. For seven years, she worked as a bookseller in the New York gallery of Bauman Rare Books. In the fall of 2011, she founded Honey & Wax Booksellers in Brooklyn. In 2017, she and Rebecca Romney established the annual Honey & Wax Book Collecting Prize of $1000 for a young woman book collector."

We met at her office early one crisp October morning to talk about all of the above, plus Gertrude Stein, Henry James, completionists, bona fide collectors, publishers' bindings and women reading, the need for unusual distinctive inventory, the way core texts reach wider audiences, apprenticing, James Jaffe, and the valuable contribution collectors make to society.

Matthew Budman lives in Manhattan with his wife, political theorist Cristina Beltrán, and all the books they can squeeze into their apartment. Budman is the author of Instant Expert: Collecting Books (House of Collectibles), which sold nearly 10,000 copies, and Book Collecting Now: The Value of Print in a Digital Age, published in 2019. It's an engaging guide to building a book collection and celebrates the young, diverse collectors revitalizing what he calls "the world's greatest pastime."

Among other things, the book examines fundamentals like: identifying first editions, how to get the best deals, understanding the value of autographs, care and repair of books, and the history of publishing and book collecting. We touch on much of this, and New York and white slavery and more, in our conversation, which took place in Matthew's book-lined apartment in Greenwich Village. The bathroom even has a decent selection to choose from!

Founded in 1884, the Grolier Club is America's oldest and largest society for bibliophiles and enthusiasts in the graphic arts. Named after Jean Grolier (1489/90-1565), the collector renowned for sharing his library with friends, the Club's objective is to promote "the study, collecting, and appreciation of books and works on paper." Through the efforts more than eight hundred members the Club pursues this mission through its library, its public exhibitions and lectures, and its long and distinguished series of publications.

I met with Bruce Crawford, the club's current president (and a collector of Charles Dickens and other 19th-century authors) in the Thomas Phillips room of the Club's headquarters in New York, along with Susan Flamm, who is in charge of P.R. We talk about the Club's history and mission, book collecting, Charles Darwin, minnows, and much more.

Jerry Kelly is a calligrapher, book and type designer. His work has been honored many times - his designs have been selected more than thirty times for the AIGA "Fifty Books of the Year." In 2015 he was presented with the Goudy Award from The Rochester Institute of Technology.

Kelly has served as Chairman of the American Printing History Association, and President of The Typophiles. He is an active member of several committees at The Grolier Club. He has written many articles and several books on calligraphy and typography, including The Noblest Roman: The Centaur Types (co-authored with Misha Beletsky; winner of the 2016 Bibliographical Society of America Prize).

Kelly has taught typography at Pratt Institute and Parsons School of Design, and has lectured on the subject for The Cooper Union and numerous other organizations.

Before starting his own design business in 1998, Kelly was Vice President of The Stinehour Press, preceded by a decade as designer at A. Colish.

We met at The Grolier Club in New York to discuss some of the great type and book designers Jerry writes about in A Century for a Century. The two other books of special interest to collectors mentioned during our conversation are The Best of Both Worlds: Finely Printed Livres d Artistes, 1910 2010, and The Art of the Book in the Twentieth Century

McNally Jackson Books is an independent bookstore based in New York City owned and operated by Sarah McNally, a former editor at Basic Books and the daughter of Holly and Paul McNally, founders of McNally Robinson Booksellers based in Winnipeg, Manitoba.

Sarah opened her first of seven stores in 2004 as a branch of McNally Robinson. In August 2008 she established McNally Jackson as an independent company. In October 2019 she met me.

We consorted in the basement of her flagship store. Two thirds of the way through our conversation we were jointed by Jeff Deutsch, Director of Chicago's Seminary Co-op Bookstore.

Among other things, our discussion covers chocolate bars, delegation, Sunday emails, rents & real estate, the procreation of bookstores, Sarah's stationery, aversion to irrational travel rules, reading not changing the world, smugness, Trevor Noah's book, mutual respect, civic missions, retail in Paris, mobs of tourists, visuals, the importance of cover designs, the retreat of criticism, Instagram, bugs, Bison Books, offices, seminary students, lines on the floor, browsing, tables and buying-energy, matcha and mouldy mugs.

Chip Kidd is an American graphic designer best known for his book covers. Based in New York City, Kidd is arguably the most famous dust jacket designers in the world. He has been credited by many as having spawned "a revolution in the art of America book packaging," despite having no recognizable style. In fact, he says that "A signature look is crippling… [because] the simplest and most effective solutions aren't dictated by style."

It has been said by many that the history of book design can be split into two eras: before Kidd and after.

He went to work at Knopf in 1986. Today he is associate art director and freelances widely, designing in total, some 75 dust jackets a year.

We met in his offices at Knopf in New York to discuss his book Chip Kidd: Book 2.

In so doing we talk about Meryl Streep, Haruki Murakami Martin Amis, the Eisner Awards, French kissing Neil Gaiman and connecting with authors, Alfred and Blanche Knopf, Sonny Mehta, D.A. Dwiggins, Paul Bacon, Geek Love, die cuts, Glamorama, the Yale Review, Chip's late husband poet and Yale Review editor J. D. McClatchy, Chris Ware, the Factory record label, Peter Seville, New Order album covers, the importance of dust jackets and identities, ebooks, death, being paid for your ideas and much more.

* This interview was recorded in October, 2019. Sonny Mehta died in December, 2019.

Bay Area letterpress printer, designer, and publisher Peter Rutledge Koch is recognized as one of the most accomplished printers and typographic designers of his generation. Here he is in his own words:

"For the past thirty-two years I have cultivated a cross-media dialogue between art, philosophy and literature. I have conducted my business as a fine-art printer as a means of creating and transmitting my own ideas about language and form, both by creating my own work and by designing and directing collaborative publishing projects with others. In pursuit of my art, I am deeply committed to the crafts of typography, papermaking, printing, bookbinding and the design of books and I support these crafts as intensely as I can. A duality of commitment defines my art. I firmly stand on the side of the argument that there is no art without craft. Art without craft denies the difficult beauty of a thing well made, the elegant simplicity of an idea. Through craft and the precision of design, I seek to bring the rich civilization of the printed book with me to the forge of meaning."

We met in New York just prior to him presenting a talk on his craft to The Grolier Club, which, at the time was hosting a 45 year retrospective of his work.