The Biblio File hosted by Nigel Beale

Will Rueter is the proprietor of the Aliquando Press which was founded in 1962 "to enable its proprietor to learn the basics of printing and binding books by hand." To date the Press has produced 109 books. It is located in Dundas, Ontario.

Thomas James Cobden-Sanderson was a renowned British bookbinder, and passionate private printer. He was proprietor of the Doves Press, one of the most influential private presses of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Its standards of quality have influenced commercial and fine presses for more than a century.

I met with Will at his workshop in Dundas to talk about his press, and Cobden-Sanderson. Among other things we discuss bookbinding, dinner with William Morris, the Doves Press, Emery Walker, Doves' type, Bessie Hooley, Majesty, Beauty and Order, red ink, Jim Rimmer, patterns and ornaments, Elbert Hubbard, Leonard Barr, Paul Dinsing, Rollin Milroy and his Heavenly Monkey Press, the Hogarth Press, the Nonesuch Press, polymer plates, Massey College, "The Seafarer", printing and emotion; responsibility, sincerity, and connection with the words and the author.

Steven Temple is an antiquarian bookseller who, after operating shops on Queen Street in Toronto for forty years, moved to Welland, Ontario in 2014 where he now does business out of his home. He continues to specialize in literary books, especially Canadian literary books, general Canadiana, and select out-of-print and rare books in various fields.

We met at his home in Welland, where we discussed, among other things, his passion for finding "lost" Canadian literature, parasites on the Internet, the urgency to buy, poet Frank Prewett, rarity, utility bills, stories about books, examples of lost Canadian literature, Watters's Checklist of Canadian Literature, Steven's criteria for buying books, Robertson Davies, William Golding, Graham Greene, Alice Munro, Margaret Atwood, collecting the Governor General's Award for Fiction winners, G. Herbert Sallans's Little Man, artist Fred Varley, Canadian book design, being a pioneer, and patronizing Canada Post.

James King is the author of six novels and nine biographies, including books on David Milne, Margaret Laurence, Jack McClelland, and Lawren Harris. His biography of Herbert Read, The Last Modern, was nominated for the Governor General's Literary Award. A fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, James lives in Hamilton, Ontario.

And that's where I met him to discuss his biography of Jack McClelland, Jack, A Life with Writers. Among other things we talk of publicizing Canadian authors, happy childhoods, Patrick Crean, Esi Edugyan, magnetic personalities, P.T. Barnum, swearing, multi-national publishing houses, Canadian literature, Gabriel Roy, Margaret Laurence, Mordecai Richler, the New Canadian Library, editing, approbation, publishing poetry, Avie Bennett, the dangers of promoting Canadian culture, Alfred and Blanche Knopf, Bennett Cerf, James Laughlin, curiosity, Alice Munro, Michael Snow, Lauren Harris, The Handover, Dundurn Press, and naming Canada's national library after Jack McClelland.

Darrel J. McLeod is Cree from treaty eight territory in Northern Alberta. Before deciding to pursue writing in his retirement, he was a chief negotiator of land claims for the federal government and executive director of education and international affairs with the Assembly of First Nations. His memoir Mamaskatch: A Cree Coming of Age won the 2018 Governor General's Literary Award for non-fiction.

We met at the Canada Council's offices in Ottawa to discuss it, along with negotiating land claims and arguing for concessions; residential schools; catholic priests, sexual abuse and the fear of God. The United church, the Evangelical church, listening to birds; music; non-binary definitions of gender; traditional native foods, fish heads, red willow shoots, and moose thigh bones. Death. Unconditional love. Alcohol and weakness. And stand-up comedy.

Marvin Post is the owner of Attic Books in London, Ontario - one of the largest, most successful used/antiquarian bookstores in Canada.

I met with Marvin to discuss the reasons behind his success. Among other things we talk about buying lots of books, religious books, double downsizing, millennial debt-load, fresh stock, on-line versus in-store stock, buying buildings, skulls on shirts, shows, areas to collect in, medical books, books as investments, books into movies, fake signatures, storage units, and enjoying your life. Marvin also provides commentary on a selection of used books that I brought into the store for trade.

Sarah Henstra is a professor of English literature at Ryerson University in Toronto where she teaches courses in Gothic Horror, Fairy Tales & Fantasies, Psychoanalysis & Literature, and Creative Writing. She is the author of The Red Word, a novel that recently won the Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction.

We met in Ottawa to talk about The Red Word. Among other things we discuss The Scarlet Letter, shame, the double standard, Greek mythology, unspoken assumptions, #metoo, feminism, frats houses, university life, the 1990s, passive characters and withholding sex.

HEATHER O'NEILL is a novelist, short-story writer and essayist. Her work, which includes Lullabies for Little Criminals, The Girl Who Was Saturday Night and Daydreams of Angels, has been shortlisted for the Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction, the Orange Prize for Fiction and the Scotiabank Giller Prize in two consecutive years, and has won CBC Canada Reads, the Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction and the Danuta Gleed Award.

Born and raised in Montreal, O'Neill lives there today with her daughter. And it's there that I met with her to discuss her 2017 CLC Kreisel Lecture published in 2018 by The University of Alberta Press as Wisdom in Nonsense - Invaluable Lessons From My Father.

Among other things we talk about hating and loving your life, happiness and wonder, relationships with your parents dead and alive, memoirs versus fiction, truth, abuse and #metoo and witnesses, the legal system and power, Concordia, lying to tell the truth, editing the real world, heads being eaten off by dragons, magical radical worlds, deception versus folly, pretending, class, ignoring fathers' advice, metaphors, loneliness, ugly babies, conventional versus internal beauty, clowns, collecting, stealing cheese, Montreal's Plateau neighbourhood, and roses.

Katharine Streip received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of California at Berkeley. She has published essays on Marcel Proust, Jean Rhys, Philip Roth, and William S. Burroughs. Her research interests include comedy, the novel, 19th c. Paris and modernism.

I'm sitting in on some of her classes at Concordia University's Liberal Arts College, which offers "a unique Great Books, multidisciplinary Core Curriculum designed to provide the foundations of an education for life." Here, as part of The Biblio File Book Club, we discuss Homer's Odyssey, and with it topics including revenge, Quentin Tarantino, home and family, identity, the slaughter of suitors, the craving for experience, the desire to learn, curiosity, intelligence, problem solving, Penelope, gifts, the practice of hospitality, sacred strangers, recklessness, repetition in texts, double standards, suspicion, character arcs, women as betrayers, and the "wine blue" sea.

The Biblio File Book Club is series of book discussions with smart people about books that they believe are important; books they would recommend to loved ones...books they consider to be essential reading.

Sophie Schneideman has been an international rare book and print dealer for over 28 years, serving a long apprenticeship at Maggs Bros, an eminent book firm in Mayfair, and dealing as Sophie Schneideman Rare Books since 2007.

She specializes in several areas of book collecting, the main focus being the Art of the Book, i.e. book illustration, private presses, fine binding, fine printing and livres d'artistes, particularly of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This includes prints and books by important illustrators, photographers and graphic artists.

We met at her London studio and talked about dealing with beautiful things, starting a business, 'running' books, sniffing around and meeting people, having an international mindset, the best bookfairs, researching and cataloguing beautiful books and getting stories out of them, selling what you love, the Golden Cockerel Press, Doves Press, always buying the best copy, ephemera, trophy hunters, book collecting prizes, imperfections, the Ashendene Press, Cobden-Sanderson, books, harmony and the cosmos, the Kelmscott Press, the Nonesuch Press, limitations and rarity, the Folio Society, the Limited Editions Club, Gaylord Schanilec, Ron King at the Circle Press, and the Old School Press.