The Biblio File hosted by Nigel Beale

This past summer Meghan O'Rourke was appointed editor of The Yale Review.

In an award citation the Whiting Foundation praised her "far-reaching and ambitious" work, and noted that her "voice stands out for its power and originality." She is the author of the memoir The Long Goodbye (2011) and the poetry collections Once (2011), Halflife (2007), and Sun In Days (2017), which The New York Times named one of the 10 Best Poetry Books of the year. Her essays and poems have appeared in magazines such as The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, and Poetry. She has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Radcliffe Fellowship, a Whiting Award, a Lannan fellowship, two Pushcart Prizes, the May Sarton Poetry Prize, the Union League Prize from the Poetry Foundation, and a Front Page Award for her cultural criticism. She has taught at New York University, Princeton, and The New School, and is currently completing a book about chronic illness.

I met with Meghan in her new, bare-walled office in New Haven. It was her very first day on the job, working in the office that is. Among other things we talked about the history of The Yale Review, bridging disciplines, current events, criticism, the Paris Review in its heyday, magazines as spawning grounds for books, re-designs; private experiences with print and the pleasures of being immersed in reading; book designer Chip Kidd; Pentagram; book collecting, broadsides, and much more.

Linda Morra is a Professor at Bishop’s University in Sherbrooke, Quebec where she teaches Canadian, American, and Indigenous literatures. 

She served as the 2016-2017 Craig Dobbin Chair of Canadian Studies at University College Dublin (UCD), Ireland, and previously was awarded a Sproul Fellowship from Canadian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.

She has won several notable research and teaching awards and has served as President of the Quebec Writers’ Federation. As if this isn't enough, she also sits on the advisory boards of Guernica Press, Canadian Literature, and Studies in Canadian Literature. 

We met at her office at Bishop's to talk about Margaret Laurence and Jack McClelland, Letters, a book she edited with Laura K. Davis. 

Sandra Campbell, a graduate of Carleton and Ottawa Universities, specializes in Canadian and Caribbean (Bermuda) women's writing, in particular for the period 1880-1940. She has a particular interest in women's autobiography as well as gender, and the publishing industry. Professor Campbell has taught at Carleton, the University of Ottawa and McGill University, and as a Visiting Lecturer at Bermuda College. She is the author of numerous articles and co-editor of three anthologies of short fiction by Canadian women writers.

We met a her home in Kingston, Ontario to talk about Both Hands, her biography of one of Canada's greatest publishers, Lorne Pierce (1890-1961) of Ryerson Press.

Michel Gauthier has enjoyed a distinguished career in the field of festival events, tourism and recreation. He was instrumental in coordinating the participation of HRH Princess Margriet of the Netherlands in the 50th Anniversary Celebrations of the Canadian Tulip Festival, an organization that he managed from 1992 - 2005. This flagship event draws millions of visitors from all over the world each spring to Canada's capital city. From 1984-1988 he was Executive Director of Winterlude, another of Ottawa's popular festivals. Over the years he has also been active in many national and international associations. He is currently Executive Director of the Canadian Garden Council. Michel holds a Festival Director Certificate from Perdue University and a Recreation Diploma from Algonquin College.

I met with him at his home, in his library, to discuss not festivals or tulips, but his other grand passion, photography books. Among other things we talk about nudes, limited editions, black and white contrast, his mother's photo albums, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Richard Avedon, Edward Steichen, Helmut Newton, The Beatles, Patti Smith and travelling the world visiting exotic bookshops, and connecting with booksellers and great photographers.

"In 1989, Scott deWolfe began selling Shaker books, ephemera, photographs and manuscripts. Frank Wood had been selling used and rare books since the 1970s. Both worked for the Sabbathday Shaker Community in Maine.

When the two realized they would make good business partners, they started doing shows together in 1990. Two years later, during a snow storm on April Fool's Day, the doors to De Wolfe & Wood opened for the first time."

I met with the two of them at their store in Alfred, Maine to take up the story from here.

Earlier this year the Beinecke Library hosted an exhibition entitled Bibliomania; or Book Madness: A Bibliographical Romance. It takes its name from the history of "arrant book-lovers" written by Thomas Frognall Dibdin. "It follows these lovers of the book through four case studies, observing the powerful and often unexpected relationships of books with their readers, owners, authors, collectors, and creators."

"Every Book in the World! explores the passionate collecting and printing history of the legendary nineteenth-century bibliomaniac Thomas Phillipps, whose vast collection of manuscripts and early printed books filled an English country house and required more than a century of public auctions and sales to disperse."

I met with curators Ray Clemens and Diane Ducharme to talk about Phillipps, his family, his temperament, his ambition, the scope of his collection, and of course, his obsessive, destructive collecting habit.

John Sawatsky is a Canadian author, journalist and interviewing consultant.

Born in Winkler, Manitoba, he attended Simon Fraser University in the late 1960s graduating in political science. He started his career as an investigative reporter in the 1970s. While working as Ottawa correspondent for the Vancouver Sun he published a series of articles on misdeeds of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, for which he received the 1976 Michener Award.

He left daily journalism in 1979 to write books, among them a biography of Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney published 1991.

In 1982, Sawatsky began teaching classes in investigative journalism and has been an adjunct professor of journalism at Carleton University's School of Journalism since 1991. Sawatsky also works as a consultant in the practice of interviewing and has taught interviewing techniques to television anchors, reporters and print journalists in many parts of the world, including Canada, Singapore, The United States, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark.

He currently teaches an interview-technique seminar for sports reporters at ESPN. The seminar focuses on remedying "the sloppy and ineffective interviewing techniques often employed by many of today's major television and cable news interviewers". In 2004, he was hired full-time by ESPN as senior director of talent development.

We met at his home in Connecticut where I tried to discover from him how best to interview an author. During our conversation we talk about the merits of having an opinion, the positives and negatives of disagreeing with your guests and/or letting them shine, micro and macro interviewing strategies, open and close ended questions, football play-books, Howard Stern, David Letterman, Jay Leno and Johnny Carson.

Laura Claridge has written books ranging from feminist theory to biography and popular culture, most recently the story of an American icon, Emily Post: Daughter of the Gilded Age, Mistress of American Manners, for which she received a National Endowment for the Humanities grant. This project also received the J. Anthony Lukas Prize for a Work in Progress, administered by the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

Born in Clearwater, Florida, Laura received her Ph.D. in British Romanticism and Literary Theory from the University of Maryland in 1986. She taught in the English departments at Converse and Wofford colleges in Spartanburg, SC, and was a tenured professor of English at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis until 1997.

Laura's biography of iconic publisher Blanche Knopf, The Lady with the Borzoi, was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in April, 2016.

We met a her home in New York's Hudson Valley to discuss Blanche's role as publisher, and wife to Alfred Knopf.

Barabara Slate is "an artist, cartoonist, graphic novelist, comic book creator, and writer. She is one of the few female artists who has created, written, and drawn comics for both DC and Marvel Comics." In 1986 Barbara created 'Angel Love' for DC Comics, an adult-themed series for teenagers. In an exhibition review, The New York Times described her art as "emphatically of our time with its narrative of passion, gun violence, and female assertiveness."

Her textbook, You Can Do a Graphic Novel, was first published in 2010 by Penguin. Barbara recently updated it, so I took the opportunity to interview her at her home in the Hudson Valley (one that she shares with her famed husband, book binder Richard Minsky). Among other things we talk about Barbara's latest work, The Mueller Report Graphic Novel, about stick figures, personal creativity, artistic style, creating compelling characters; about page layout, writer's block, and breaking into the biz, plus loads of other useful advice on how to write/draw/create a successful graphic novel. And then there's a visit from Sparky the dog.

James Daunt is the founder of the Daunt Books chain, and since May 2011 has been managing director of the bookshop chain Waterstones. In June 2019, he became the CEO of the US bookstore chain Barnes & Noble, acquired by Waterstones's parent, Elliott Advisors for $683m.

We met last year in London to discuss Waterstones's impressive turn-around. We met last week in a small room (with apologies for the loud-ish air ventilation system) in the basement of the Union Square branch of Barnes & Noble in New York to talk about what's next for Barnes & Noble (The green room was occupied by Malcolm Gladwell who was delivering a talk at the store that evening).