The Biblio File hosted by Nigel Beale

Series: Biblio File in France

Krista Halverson is director of the newly founded Shakespeare & Company publishing house and editor of the first-ever history of the bookstore, Shakespeare & Company, Paris: A History of the Rag & Bone Shop of the Heart. Previously, she was the managing editor of Zoetrope: All-Story, a magazine of fiction and art, published by Francis Coppola and headquartered in San Francisco.

I met with Krista at the bookstore to talk about the history of Shakespeare & Company; Sylvia Beach, French bookseller Adrienne Monnier and the spark between them; anglophone ex-pats in Paris, Hemingway, of course, George Whitman, great talent, James Joyce, Ulysses, and Windsor, Ontario; Shakespeare & Company's openness, the scrapbook effect, the book's designer Loran Stosskopf, the Shakespeare & Company cafe, Tumbleweeds, hopeful youth, and the bookstore's new publishing program.

1. The Little Review was founded by Margaret Anderson and published between 1914 to 1929. With the help of Jane Heap and Ezra Pound, Anderson published modernist and other early examples of experimental writing and art in the magazine. It is best known for running a serialization of James Joyce's Ulysses and being sued in 1921 for doing so. Anderson and Heap went to trial over Ulysses's obscene content. Lawyer and patron of modernist art John Quinn defended them at the trial, and lost. The editors each had to pay a fifty-dollar fine.

2. Looks like Proust sealed off the windows in his cork-lined room

Born in 1931, Jerome Rothenberg is an American poet, translator and anthologist, noted for his work in the fields of ethnopoetics and performance poetry.

This from Wikipedia:

Technicians of the Sacred (1968), which signalled the beginning of an approach to poetry that Rothenberg, in collaboration with George Quasha, named "ethnopoetics," went beyond the standard collection of folk songs to include visual and sound poetry and the texts and scenarios for ritual events. Some 150 pages of commentaries gave context to the works included and placed them as well in relation to contemporary and experimental work in the industrial and postindustrial West. Over the next ten years, Rothenberg also founded and with Dennis Tedlock co-edited Alcheringa, the first magazine of ethnopoetics (1970–73, 1975ff.) and edited further anthologies, including:- Shaking the Pumpkin: Traditional Poetry of the Indian North Americas (1972, 2014); A Big Jewish Book: Poems & Other Visions of the Jews from Tribal Times to the Present (revised and republished as Exiled in the Word, 1977 and 1989); America a Prophecy: A New Reading of American Poetry from Pre-Columbian Times to the Present (1973, 2012), co-edited with George Quasha; and Symposium of the Whole: A Range of Discourse Toward An Ethnopoetics (1983), co-edited with Diane Rothenberg. Rothenberg's approach throughout was to treat these large collections as deliberately constructed assemblages or collages, on the one hand, and as manifestos promulgating a complex and multiphasic view of poetry on the other. Speaking of their relation to his work as a whole, he later wrote of the anthology thus conceived as "an assemblage or pulling together of poems & people & ideas about poetry (& much else) in the words of others and in [my] own words. That imago – that representation of where we've been and what we've lived through – is something in fact that I would stand by – like any poem."

...along with Nicholson Baker, Robert Graves and Laura Riding, pretty well summarizes what we talk about.

Series: Biblio File in France

A recent fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (Berlin) and visiting researcher at the Centre Interdisciplinaire de Recherches Centre-Européennes (Sorbonne-Paris IV), Daniel Medin joined the faculty of The American University of Paris in January 2010. He has taught German, English and comparative literature at Stanford University, Washington University in St. Louis and the Free University Berlin.

He is associate director of the Center for Writers and Translators and one of the editors of its Cahiers series (published jointly with Sylph Editions in London). He is also co-editor of Music & Literature magazine, edits The White Review's annual translation issue, and advises several journals and presses on contemporary international fiction. A judge for the Best Translated Book Award in 2014 and 2015, he served on the jury of the 2016 Man Booker International Prize.

We met in his office in Paris to discuss, among other things, translation as it pertains to book publishing, judging international translation prizes - prioritizing literary quality ('best' title wins) vs prioritizing a book on the basis of what winning would do for it (its effect, whether economic, political or symbolic); discoveries, music living due to its interpreter, following Michael Orthofer's Complete Review, Chad Post's Three Percent and Veronica Esposito; Fitzcarraldo Editions, loyalty, commercial pressure, New Directions, Archipelago Books, Transit Books, Olga Tokarczuk's novel Flights, 800 page books, meaning versus style, old versus new generational translations, footnotes, stealth glosses, mystery and google, Haruki Murakami, László Krasznahorkai and Serhiy Zhadan's novel Mesopotamia.

Stephen Weiner is an award winning writer about comics & graphic novels. He has been writing about comics since 1992, and is the most recognized librarian responsible for promoting graphic novel collections in public libraries & bookstores. He is the director of the Maynard Public Library in Maynard, Massachusetts.

His books include: 100 Graphic Novels for Public Libraries, The 101 Best Graphic Novels, Faster than a Speeding Bullet: the Rise of the Graphic Novel, The Will Eisner Companion, The 101 Best Graphic Novels, 2nd edition, The Hellboy Companion, and Faster than a Speeding Bullet: the Rise of the Graphic Novel, 2nd edition. He is also co-editor of the 7 volume series A Critical Survey of Graphic Novels, and author of the novel, Tom's House.

I met with Stephen at the Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec (BAnQ) in Montreal. Among other things we talk about the definition of the graphic novel, Art Spiegelman's Maus, Neil Gaiman's The Sandman, outlaw status, boys and libraries, and the top 10 greatest graphic novels of all time.

John Ralston Saul was elected President of International PEN in October 2009 (his term ended in 2015).

His award-winning essays and novels have had an impact on political and economic thought in many countries. Declared a "prophet" by TIME magazine, he is included in the prestigious Utne Reader's list of the world's 100 leading thinkers and visionaries. His works have been translated into 22 languages in 30 countries.

He has received many national and international awards for his writing, most recently South Korea's Manhae Grand Prize for Literature. He has published (at least) five novels, and is General Editor of the Penguin Extraordinary Canadians project, a series of 17 biographies that reinterprets important Canadian figures for a contemporary audience by pairing well-known Canadian writers with significant historical, political and artistic figures from 1850 onwards. Born in Ottawa, Saul studied at McGill University and King's College, University of London, where he obtained his PhD in 1972.

We met in Ottawa in a noisy now defunct bookstore to discuss his editing of the Extraordinary Canadians series, and his authoring of Lafontaine and Baldwin.

Series: Biblio File in France

Economist Jean-Guy Boin is the former Director General of the International Bureau of French Publishing (www.bief.org), the international promotion organization of French books. He has held various positions in the book sector: teacher and trainer, researcher specializing in publishing economics, general administrator of a publishing house of literature and human sciences, head of the department "book economics" department at the Ministry of Culture and Communication. He is the author of two books on "small publishers" (La Documentation française) and has written numerous articles on the economics of publishing, the bookstore and the distribution of the book.

We met in the Saint-Germain-des-Prés neighbourhood of Paris, home to fames literary cafes including Les Deux Magots, Café de Flore, and le Procope, bookstores and publishing houses. We talk about, among other things, the French publishing experience, the Fixed Book Price, competition in service not price, books as an industry of supply, droit d'auteur and moral right, literary agents, translation, marketing as king in the U.S., Paul Otchakovsky-Laurens, Hachette, Editions Grasset, Emmanuel Carrere, the Gilbert and Companie bookstores, Amazon, and reading publishers' catalogues.

During our conversation Jean-Guy suggests that Richard Charkin thinks that getting rid of the Net Book Agreement in England was a mistake. I spoke with Richard about this. His response: "Bollocks. Absolutely no regrets. The French love regulations! Also, their international horizons are much more restricted than ours. How could we have retail price maintenance in the UK when there is no such thing in USA? US publishers would be flooding our market. Je ne regrette rien!"

Series: Biblio File in France

Héloïse d'Ormesson is a French publisher who founded a publishing house that bears her name. She studied comparative literature at Yale University in the United States, where she landed her first job in publishing, and then returned to France to work at Flammarion as director of foreign literature, and subsequently as an editor at Denoël, Laffont, and within the Gallimard group of companies.

In 2004, she founded Editions Héloïse d'Ormesson with her partner Gilles Cohen-Solal. She is the daughter of famed French writer Jean d'Ormesson

We met at her offices in Paris to discuss, among other things, why so many editors become publishers, a publishers' freedom and control, illustrated covers and French tradition, readers versus customers, the lack of good literary agents in France, Fixed Price and the importance of booksellers; publishing as a cultural industry, Amazon, Heloise's heart and soul, her father Jean, books in the house at an early age, bookshelves as walls and furniture; favourite bookstores, The Scarlet Letter, Mollat in Bordeaux, championing books, the Grand Prix Jean d'Ormesson award, overlooked masterpieces, Jacques Stephen Alexis's In the Flicker of an Eyelid, luck, every book being unique, the lack of a formula for success, and thrills.

Series: Biblio File in France

Pierre Astier and Laure Pecher are co-founders of their own eponymous literary and film agency. Pierre represents mainly French-speaking authors and publishers. After working in the art world for ten years, he created the quarterly short stories magazine Le Serpent à Plumes in 1988. In 1993, together with Claude Tarrène, he set up a publishing house of the same name focusing on contemporary fiction. Laure represents both authors and publishers. After having studied Byzantine philology, she worked for five years at Le Serpent à Plumes as rights manager. In 2002, she started publishing classics with Les Classiques du Monde at Editions Zoé (Geneva).

The three of us met in their garden in Le Perche, France where we talked about, among other things, the role of the literary agent, writers festivals and conferences, finding the best most passionate publishers, Archipelago Books and Ove Knausgaard, Elena Ferrante, African authors in France, paradise near Paris, commissioning books, writing workshops, espresso, differences between French and American agents, Eastern European markets, the invasion of American authors, lack of diversity, resistance by French publishers to agents, film rights, musical chairs, translation, author-agent relations, differences between pitching publishers and producers, Andrew Wylie's client list, Aslı Erdoğan, passion and luck, Patrice Nganang, and the most exciting part of the job.

"Ashley Obscura is a Canadian-Mexican writer, publisher and editor. She is the author of the poetry collections Ambient Technology and I Am Here (Metatron, 2014) and four digital poetry projects: LIGHGHT, How to Be A Rainbow, Aura Halo and Oh, Inverted Universe. The founder and managing editor of Metatron Press, Obscura currently lives in Montreal, Quebec where she holds a Bachelor of Arts in Creative Writing and Professional Writing."

We met at her new offices in Montreal and talked about, among other things, smart phones, Saskatoon and open skies, Montreal and multi-culturalism, Concordia University's Creative Writing Program, others' doubt as good ammunition, creating space, new forms of digital poetry, Alt Lit Gossip, how the Internet benefits upstart publishers and poets, Wild "This is happening whether you like it or not" literary readings, making poetry accessible, ambition among Millennials, "Follow your dreams" advice, Rupi Kaur, Instagram poetry, nostalgia, relationships with authors, sex in your twenties, menstruation, vulnerability, poetry and freedom, the importance of publishing poets at the start of their careers, teaching poetry, and mentors.

Robert Weaver (1928–2008) was an influential, well-loved Canadian editor and broadcaster. He was born in Niagara Falls and educated at the University of Toronto, and worked at the CBC where he created a series of radio shows that featured then unknown Canadian writers such as Alice Munro, Mordecai Richler, Timothy Findley, Margaret Atwood, and Leonard Cohen. In 1956 Weaver founded The Tamarack Review, a long-standing Canadian literary magazine. Over the course of his career, Weaver edited more than a dozen anthologies. In 1979 he launched the annual CBC Literary Prize. Elaine Kalman Naves is an award-winning Quebec writer, journalist, editor and lecturer. She's the author of Robert Weaver, Godfather of Canadian Literature. In discussing it we talk about, among other things, Niagara Falls, Toronto, spinster aunts, the love of books and reading, bank jobs, the University of Toronto, Northrop Frye, abortion, CBC Radio, 'Canadian Short Stories,' editing Alice Munro, understatement, anthologies, The Tamarack Review, the popularity of the Anthology radio program, Margaret Atwood, pipe rituals, drinking, Robert Fulford, listening, editorial and critical standards, honesty, the CBC Literary Prize and William Notman.