Sir Tim Waterstone revolutionized bookselling in Britain and changed the country's cultural landscape. He also wrote a memoir, called The Face Pressed Against a Window (Atlantic, 2019). We met at The Garrick Club in London to talk about the book, and about how he accomplished what he accomplished.  Topics covered in our conversation include Tim's troubled relationship with his father, his eight children, the creative strategy behind growing the Waterstones empire (starting in 1982); an epiphany in Cambridge’s Heffers Bookshop; Waterstones' "happy" family; W.H. Smith, James Daunt, author support, a combative attitude; offering a huge range of titles for sale and staying open longer hours; Miss Santoro's bookshop in Crowborough; seeing a market and making accessible an unprecedented selection of literature; the brilliance of the John Sandoe Bookshop in Chelsea; the "perfect stock, perfect staff, perfect control" mantra, bookstores as literary festivals, and the importance of book sales per square foot. 

I was in Ireland recently to interview two of the best novelists on the face of the planet. John Banville, in Dublin, and David Mitchell, in Cork. As a cost-cutting measure I decided to ask them both the same questions: What do you do? How do you do it? Why do you do it? And: Why does it matter? I got diametrically opposed answers.

So much for my cherished ambition of capturing definitive, unified explanations of what the best novelists (in this case) do, and how they do it at the dawn of the 21st century. David Mitchell is compelled to make narrative. Better and better narrative. He are his novels, in order:

• Ghostwritten (1999)

• Number9Dream (2001)

• Cloud Atlas (2004)

• Black Swan Green (2006)

• The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (2010)

• The Bone Clocks (2014)

• Slade House (2015)

• Utopia Avenue (2020)

Ghostwritten takes place all over the world - ‘from Okinawa to Mongolia to New York City’ and is told in interconnecting stories by nine different narrators. It won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize (best work of British literature written by an author under 35) and was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award. number9dream and Cloud Atlas were both shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. In 2003 David was selected as one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists.’ In 2007 Time magazine included him among their 100 Most Influential People in The World. In 2018 he won the Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence, given in recognition of a writer's entire body of work.

In other words, David is a best practitioner. He lives about an hour's drive from Cork. We met downtown for a taste of the city and a bite to eat. The better part of our afternoon was spent chatting about love and literature, and searching for a quiet place where we could clock our Biblio File best-practitioner conversation. Lovely, colourful city Cork. Tad noisy. We don’t talk much about specific books but we do attempt an "understanding" of the novel writing process in light of how David has gone about creating his wonderful Balzacian oeuvre.

Early on in this conversation there's a dead patch. The mic didn't pick up the glorious seagull call that comes reverberating down the chimney into the room John Banville and I were sitting in.    John Banville is an Irish novelist, short-story writer, and screenwriter who hates his own work. He's won a ton of prizes ("hundreds") including the Booker in 2005 for The Sea. He's currently waiting on the Nobel. John published his first novel, Nightspawn, in 1971, and his first book, a collection of short-stories called Long Lankin, in 1970. In addition to the "literary" work he's also written a string of popular crime novels.  We met at his home in Howth; Howth, as you’ll know, is located near that meadow in Ulysses where James Joyce has Molly Bloom saying: "…the sun shines for you he said the day we were lying among the rhododendrons on Howth head in the grey tweed suit and his straw hat the day I got him to propose to me yes like now yes 16 years ago my God after that long kiss I near lost my breath yes he said I was a flower of the mountains yes so we are flowers all a woman’s body yes that was one true thing he said in his life and the sun shines for you today yes…" "…I was a Flower of the mountains yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him and yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will yes." John mentions what a curse it is to have Joyce, and Yeats (who, as you’ll also know, wooed Maude Gonne on Howth Head), et al, writing like this, constantly looming in the rearview mirror; I follow on with the regular drill, asking John: what he does, how he does it, why he does it, and why it matters.

Last year I interviewed Margaret Atwood about "the role" of the writer. No such thing she informed me. So we talked about the "non-role." Combatative she is. Just like Tim Parks. He talks with me here about the other end of the spectrum, the reader. How to be a better one. I want him to be prescriptive, he won’t be. But he does provide a lot of excellent insights, despite the resistence.

Tim is an author, essayist, and translator. He was born in Manchester in 1954, grew up in London, and studied at Cambridge and Harvard. Not sure where or if he graduated from anywhere, but no matter. He's written 19 novels including Europa, Destiny, and most recently Hotel Milano, plus numerous works of non-fiction, including Where I'm Reading From, which we reference during our conversation. He's a regular contributor to the London Review of Books and the New York Review of Books. Aside from his own writing he has translated works by Moravia, Pavese, Calvino, Machiavelli and Leopardi from Italian into English.

He's a very astute reader. A best practitioner I'd say, which makes him eligible to be a Biblio File podcast guest - given that our mission is to interview the best in the world of books. I invited him to talk about how "best" to go about reading a book. We talk about Borges's essays - notably one on James Joyce's perfect reader; an author's manner of addressing the reader, what the reader brings to the text, having an open attitude about what you read; Thomas Hardy; D.H. Lawrence as one of Hardy's best readers; Mortimer Adler; being argumentative, and more.

Marta Sylvestrova is a curator and art critic, and has headed the graphic design department at the Moravian Gallery in Brno, Czech Republic, since 1986. She is a graduate of Masaryk University where she studied art history, and has, over the years, been involved in the organizing of many Brno Biennieles. They feature and evaluate graphic designs from around the world every two years, alternating for many years, between celebration of book jacket design and poster design. It closed, somewhat controversially, in 2018,

I went to Brno to talk to Marta about this controversy, but also, primarily, to talk about a big, beautiful four kilogram exhibition catalogue she edited 20 years ago entitled Czech Film Posters of the 20th Century, published in 2004 by the Moravian Gallery.  

Nic Bottomley is a bookseller, and co-owner with his wife Juliette of Mr B's Emporium of Reading Delights, an independent bookshop based in Bath that has twice been named UK Independent Bookshop of the Year. Prior to setting up shop Nic was a capital markets lawyer. He currently serves as Executive Chair of the Booksellers Association of UK and Ireland.  We spoke via Zoom about his innovative "Reading Spas," about approaching customers, and reading related to passions and careers; other topics discussed include: themed displays, arrogant book selection, whether or not the bookselling model is broken, the Elliott Bay Bookstore in Seattle, honeymoons, butchery novels, work-related reading lists, paying attention to detail, biblio-therapy, work ethics, a bookshop's personality, “the browse,” and way more. 

In 1999 he inaugurated the Grijalbo Mondadori bookshop in Havana​. ​In 2000 he returned to Italy as director of Books Edizioni Mondadori. The following year, the Random House Mondadori joint venture was established ​and Cavallero assumed the position of Chief Executive Officer​ initially ​based in New York and then, from 2004, in Barcelona.​ ​

​In 2010 ​he was appointed ​General Manage​​r​ of​ Libri Trade Mondadori and Chief Executive Officer of Einaudi​, under which the ​Piemme, Sperling & Kupfer and Frassinelli houses​ operated.​ ​​In 2016​ he launched a new venture, founding his own house,​ called SEM Società Editrice Milanese.​ He sold it in the Spring of 2023. 

We met in Milan to talk about his take on book publishing. Topics covered include Libya, the Hoepli bookstore in Milan, Hemingway, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, nipples, different ways of looking at Latin America, atlases, nationalism, the fun of hitting the big one, Sonny Mehta, buying Fifty Shades of Grey, the impact of Covid, travel and understanding the world, meeting people, diversity, Africa, new writers, exiles and revolutions, bars, interesting people, getting 'out there;' listening, and asking questions, participating in life, partying, SEM, weekly dinners being a better investment than advertising, jazz music, Verso Bar and Bookshop in Milan, jamming with Ken Follett, offering stages for new voices, and giving birth. 

Matteo Columbo is Margaret Atwood's publicist and personal magician at the Ponte alle Grazie publishing house in Italy. We met in Milan to discuss, among other things, the relationship between magic and publicity, the things that Margaret's handlers insist must be present in her hotel rooms; banana tricks, surprises, examples of how to gain the attention of journalists, Ponte alle Grazie's eclectic backlist, Luigi Spagnol, books as unique entities, the impact of Margaret's in-person Italian appearances, comparisons between publicity and photography; trustworthiness, syntax, and more.