The Biblio File hosted by Nigel Beale

I met with publisher Simon Dardick at his home office in Montreal to talk about the history and collecting of his long-running literary publishing house Vehicule Press.

Glenn Dixon has published two books. Pilgrim in the Palace of Words: A journey through the 6000 languages of Earth was published in 2009 to rave reviews. His second, Tripping the World Fantastic: A journey through the music of our planet came out in April of 2013. He has also published travel articles and cultural pieces in major publications such as National Geographic Magazine, the New York Post, the Walrus Magazine, the Globe and Mail and even Psychology Today.

Glenn has traveled through seventy countries and worked on documentary films in Egypt, Tibet, Russia, Peru, Ecuador, Turkey and many others. He has three degrees including a Masters degree in socio-linguistics. He lives and works in Calgary, Canada.

Marcello Di Cintio is a Canadian writer. He won the 2012 Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing for his book Walls: Travels Along the Barricades. The award was handed out on March 6, 2013 at the Writers' Trust of Canada's annual Politics and the Pen in Ottawa. Marcello was born in Calgary, Alberta where he currently lives with his wife, Moonira, and son, Amedeo.

We met recently to discuss his literary pilgrimage to Iran, which he wrote about in his book, Poets and Pahlevans, a Journey into the Heart of Iran.

Rae Armantrout is an American poet generally associated with Language Poets. Armantrout was born in Vallejo, California but grew up in San Diego. She has published more than 10 books of poetry and has also been featured in a number of major anthologies. Armantrout teaches at the University of California, San Diego, where she is Professor of Poetry and Poetics.

Armantrout was awarded the 2009 National Book Critics Circle Award for her collection of poetry Versed, published by the Wesleyan University Press. The book later earned the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Armantrout's collection, Just Saying, was published in 2013. She is the recipient of numerous other awards for her poetry including an award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts in 2007 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2008.

We met in Ottawa to discuss her poetry, William Carlos Williams, place, and how to be a literary tourist in San Diego.

The Press & Letterfoundry of Michael & Winifred Bixler is "devoted to the craft of fine letterpress printing and traditional book typography. Our extensive collection of English Monotype matrices allows us to cast from 8- to 72-point, classic book typefaces including Bembo, Dante, Walbaum, Van Dijck, Joanna, Perpetua, Garamond, Centaur & Arrighi, Ehrhardt, Fournier, Bell, Baskerville, Poliphilus, Plantin, Gill Sans, & Univers. Work is designed, set, printed, & bound in our shop. We use Vandercook & Heidelberg cylinder presses. Fonts are cast on commission & sold by the pound."

I met with Michael and Winifred at their shop in Skaneateles, NY to discuss letterpress printing, and all things Monotype.

I met with David Mason in Kingston to talk about his memoir The Pope's Bookbinder. As the Biblioasis website wordsmiths have it:

"From his drug-hazy, book-happy years near the Beat Hotel in Paris and throughout his career as antiquarian book dealer, David Mason brings us a storied life. He discovers his love of literature in a bathtub at age eleven, thumbing through stacks of lurid Signet paperbacks. At fifteen he's expelled from school. For the next decade and a half, he will work odd jobs, buck all authority, buy books more often than food, and float around Europe. He'll help gild a volume in white morocco for Pope John XXIII. And then, at the age of 30, after returning home to Canada and apprenticing with Joseph Patrick Books, David Mason will find his calling."

"David Mason boldly campaigns for what he feels is the moral duty of the antiquarian trade: to preserve the history and traditions of all nations, and to assert without compromise that such histories have value. The Pope's Bookbinder is an engrossing memoir by a giant in the book trade—whose infectious enthusiasm, human insight, commercial shrewdness, and deadpan humour will delight bibliophiles for decades to come. "

Matthew Tree (born December 30, 1958) is a writer in English and Catalan. He has lived in Barcelona since 1984. Apart from publishing both fiction and non-fiction, he is a contributor to various newspapers and magazines such as Catalonia Today,The Times Literary Supplement, Barcelona INK, Altaïr, El Punt Avui and L'Esguard. He has also appeared on various Catalan language radio and TV stations and is current a monthly guest on Catalunya Ràdio's chat show L'Oracle. In 2005 and 2006 he scripted and presented two series of the infotainment programme Passatgers for TV3 (Catalan Public Television).

His most recent book, a novel in English, is entitled Snug. It's about a small village in the Isle of Wight which finds itself under siege by Africans who have gone there for that very purpose.

I caught up with Matthew recently, on a blustery afternoon, to talk about cool literary things to do while in Barcelona.

George Tremlett (born 1939) is an English author, bookshop owner, and former politician.

According to his own biography, after leaving King Edward VI School Stratford-upon-Avon, he worked for the Coventry Evening Telegraph from 1957 onward as a TV columnist and pop music reviewer. In 1961 he became a freelance rock journalist and in the 1970s wrote a series of paperbacks on pop stars, including The David Bowie Story, the first bio of the musician.

He is a biographer of Dylan Thomas and his wife Caitlin. He interviewed Caitlin at her home in Catalonia for the book Caitlin: Life with Dylan Thomas. He has argued that Thomas was "the first rock star." In 1997 he published a book with James Nashold, The Death of Dylan Thomas, which claimed that Thomas' death was not due to alcohol poisoning but to a mistake by Thomas' physician in prescribing cortisone, morphine and benzedrine when Thomas was actually in a diabetic coma.

Tremlett runs the Corran Bookshop in Laugharne, Wales "a shrine to the poet"; has since 1982. The shop offers tourist information...and it's where I met George to have this conversation.

Wales celebrated the centenary of famed Welsh poet Dylan Thomas in 2014. Annie Haden is an experienced tourist guide and a specialist in the life of Thomas. With over 20 years experience in the tourism sector, Anne uses an easy listening story-telling technique which keeps her tours both interesting and informative. I caught up with her at Morgans hotel in Swansea, Thomas's home town, to talk about poet and place.

I met with Andre Alexis to discuss his novella, A (BookThug, 2013). During our conversation we hit, among other things, on literary criticism, book reviewing, 'Good' and 'Baddeley' literary critics, and David Gilmour and his GG Award winning novel A Perfect Night to go to China, and Alexis's contention that racism is contained in the chapter in this novel entitled "The Pigeon".

Please note that, as a condition of making the recording of this conversation public, Alexis's essay entitled "Of a Smallness in the Soul" is being made readily available (as it is right here) to visitors to this web page...and that the point is being made, clearly, that this essay is Alexis's argument for (or demonstration of) the racism contained in ...David Gilmour's chapter entitled "The Pigeon", from his novel, The Perfect Order of Things."