The Biblio File hosted by Nigel Beale – Details, episodes & analysis

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The Biblio File hosted by Nigel Beale

Nigel Beale

Arts

Frequency: 1 episode/12d. Total Eps: 598

THE BIBLIO FILE is a podcast about "the book," and an inquiry into the wider world of book culture. Hosted by Nigel Beale it features wide ranging, long-form conversations with authors, poets, book publishers, booksellers, book editors, book collectors, book makers, book scholars, book critics, book designers, book publicists, literary agents and many others inside the book trade and out - from writer to reader.

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Data updated on 14/09/2026

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🇨🇦 Canada - Books
14/09/2026
#86

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http://bluemetropolis.org/Festival
9 shares
https://four.libsyn.com/content_edit/index/item_id/
4 shares
https://www.waterstones.com/
3 shares

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECW_Press
2 shares
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Charkin
2 shares
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_League_of_Antiquarian_Booksellers
2 shares

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Score global : 42%

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Timothy Heyman on B. Traven and how to manage a literary archive

Sunday, May 11, 2025 • Duration 01:03:26

B. Traven's novels and stories have sold more than 30 million copies over the past century in more than 30 languages worldwide. He was Einstein's favourite novelist. Der Spiegel ranks his The Death Ship as the third greatest German novel ever written (okay in the past 100 years), after Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, and Kafka's The Castle; and yet, despite this, few today, in the English speaking world at least, have heard of him. It's only thanks to the movie, The Treasure of Sierra Madre, based on one of his stories, that he's known here at all. Why is this?

Perhaps because no-one knows with absolute certainty who Traven was. No-one is 100% sure of his true identity.

Timothy Heyman (CBE) is 99% sure. We talk here about his hypothesis, plus the tasks he's set himself to re-establish Traven's reputation and re-gain an audience for his works.

Heyman, a considerable person in his own right, is co-manager (recently promoted to managing director) of the B. Traven Estate along with his wife (who is proprietor), Malú Montes de Oca de Heyman, Traven's stepdaughter.

I met Tim up in the couple's beautiful apartment overlooking Mexico City to talk about what he's achieved to date with Traven's literary archive, and, again, who he thinks Traven really was. We were surrounded by a library of books written by the mystery man, accompanied by a glorious panoramic view of the city.
After our conversation we went upstairs to a special room which holds the archive - the place where Tim occupies himself with the business of legacy building.

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David McKnight on Collecting The Beatles

Friday, March 28, 2025 • Duration 01:08:24

Some years ago I interviewed David McKnight about a collection of Canadian "little magazines" he'd hunted down and later donated to the University of Alberta's Bruce Peel Library. It was very easy to get caught up in David's enthusiasm, and I was really impressed by the catalogue he'd produced. Shortly after our conversation I learned that he didn't just collect Canadian poetry, he was also a serious Beatles collector.

We stayed in touch. I drove down to Philadelphia where David hosted me at his home for a weekend. We got a lot done. Took the train into New York for the opening of a film about a bookseller; went on a tour of the rare book and manuscript library at the University of Pennsylvania where David worked at the time as director; attended the Allentown Paper Fair where I picked up some old Fortune and New York Times magazines. It was great. A non-stop exchanging of excited thoughts about books, collecting, and cool periodicals.

I've been wanting to interview David about The Fab Four ever since I learned of his passion. He's a real expert on the band. I was particularly keen to find out about his personal relationship to the music, and of course, about his experience collecting and documenting its impact on print culture, internationally, high and low. Finally, after years of talking about it, we got down to business. The albums, the books - from limited editions to paperbacks - the magazines, the fan zines, the ephemera, the scrap-books, the puzzles. Liverpool. It's all here.

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Michael Erdman on the history of magazines (and women's rights) in Turkey

Saturday, February 15, 2025 • Duration 01:00:54

Michael Erdman is Head of Middle East and Central Asian Collections at The British Library with overall responsibility for all manuscript holdings in Arabic, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Chagatai, Coptic, Hebrew, Kurdish, Ottoman Turkish, Persian, and Syriac.

I talked with him about my recent magazine hunting exploits in Istanbul, and how what we found fits into the overall history of magazine publishing in Turkey. Esoteric, I know, but hey, this is where passion takes you.

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Andres M. Zervigon on Illustrated Magazines

Thursday, January 9, 2025 • Duration 01:12:12

I first came across Andrés Mario Zervigón's (Cuban) name while researching a magazine that filled me with awe the first time I saw it.

AIZ, the Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung (Workers Illustrated Magazine) is an illustrated, mass circulation German periodical that was published in Berlin during the 1920s and 1930s (in Prague after 1933). It contains some of the most emotionally charged imagery I've ever seen. The best work was by John Heartfield.

Zervigón is professor of the history of photography at Rutgers University in New Jersey. He obtained his PhD from Harvard University in 2000 and concentrates his scholarship "on the interaction between photographs, film, and fine art." His first book, John Heartfield and the Agitated Image: Photography, Persuasion, and the Rise of Avant-Garde Photomontage (University of Chicago Press, 2012), proposes that "photography's sudden ubiquity in illustrated magazines, postcards, and posters produced an unsettling transformation of visual culture that artists felt compelled to address."

Zervigón's work, says the Rutger's website, "generally focuses upon moments in history when these media [film, photography, fine art] prove inadequate to their presumed task of representing the visual."

We start our conversation by unpacking this passage, and then move on to a short history of illustrated, mass circulation magazines, (including VU magazine), then to the life of John Heartfield, and finally to AIZ.

Background here

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Tony Fekete on Collecting Erotica

Tuesday, December 31, 2024 • Duration 52:56

Tony Fekete is a book collector who for years specialized in collecting erotica. He's best known for the catalogue he produced for a Christie's auction that took place in 2014 that featured highlights from his collection. More than 200 books, manuscripts, lithographs and erotic photographs went up for sale, including a first edition of My Secret Life (1888), an eleven-volume memoir that describes in detail the sex life of an anonymous Victorian "Gentleman," of which only twenty-five copies were printed. The auction netted Fekete more than a million pounds. Tony is a mobile bibliophile who travels frequently, primarily by train, in pursuit of books. Born in London in 1954 of Hungarian descent, he worked for Citibank in Eastern Europe during the mid-1980s where he cultivated both his love of books and an appreciation for the region. Today he shares these passions on Instagram and Facebook, posting photographs of his journeysthroughout Eastern Europe, that feature old bars and restaurants that he favours and, of course, highlights from his still significant (and stimulating) erotica collection. I spoke with him via Zoom.

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Siegfried Lukatis on Insel Bucherei, the iconic German book series

Monday, October 14, 2024 • Duration 58:26

Siegfried Lokatis is a retired professor of book history, and former head of the University of Leipzig's Institute for Communication and Media Studies. He is the author of Book Covers of the GDR and is currently working on a history of the S. Fischer publishing house, due out in 2026.

We met in Leipzig recently where Siegfried treated me to a tour of the Bibliotop's splendid Insel Bucherei book collection.

Founded in 1912, the series now contains some 2,000 titles (and still counting according to Jonathan Landgrebe, head of Suhrkamp Verlag, the company that today produces the books). The series is iconic in Germany and in many ways its publishing history reflects the history of the country. The books are known for their beauty and the care with which they're produced. Qualities include: individual typographical design, exquisite illustration (notably from the thirties - stay tuned) and photography, and printing on wood-free, age-resistant paper, plus they're thread-stitched and bound in decorative cover paper. They served as the model for Allen Lane's King Penguin series.

The Insel Bucherie series includes both well-known and little known texts from world literature as well as art history, non-fiction, poetry, and fairy tales, plus gift anthologies from Germany and around the globe.

Subjects covered in my conversation with Siegfried include Rilke and copyright, the decision to publish established, versus contemporary works; Stephan Zweig and the Nazis, poisonous mushrooms, the rarest volume, the Allied bombing of Leipzig, censorship, the separation of East and West Germany, wartime profits, collecting, pornography and more.

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Richard Charkin on Lessons Learned from 50 Years in Book Publishing

Tuesday, August 27, 2024 • Duration 01:10:31

Richard Charkin has held senior posts at many major, and some minor, publishing houses in the U.K. over the past 50 years, including: Harrap, OUP, Pergamon Press, Reed Elsevier, Macmillan, Bloomsbury, and Mensch Publishing. He is former President of The Book Society, the International Publishers Association and the UK Publishers Association.

His book My Back Pages, An Undeniably Personal History of Publishing 1972-2022 came out in 2023. The book has sold more than 3,000 copies, and is being translated into four languages. It took me a year to figure out what questions to ask him.

Just so you know, Richard has been very good to The Biblio File podcast over the years. Thanks to him I've landed all sorts of great publishing guests. And John Banville! I'm grateful to him for this, and for his being so generous with his time and knowledge, sharing them as he has with me on multiple occasions during episodes that have dealt with, among other things, great publishers, the challenges facing the book business, and how to set up a small publishing house.

I wrote this about him a while back:

Richard does what all great publishers do. He pays attention to what's going on both in the world, and in the world of books. He pays attention to what people are doing and reaches out to them to learn more. He takes an interest. It's pretty simple. And pretty important. He also lets people know what he's up to. I got to know him through his blog. It gave me a wonderful glimpse into the daily life of a high-powered publisher - the workings of business, but also the workings of his mind, and occasionally his emotions…

Book scholar Jonathan Rose on who used to read Playboy magazine and Why

Tuesday, August 20, 2024 • Duration 48:48

The last time I ran into renowned book scholar Jonathan Rose (at a SHARP conference) he mentioned that he was doing some work on Playboy magazine. 'Way more women readers than you'd expect!' he told me.

Rose is an accomplished author. His groundbreaking and award-winning book, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, first published in 2001, is selling in its third edition and has been translated into multiple languages.

I emailed him recently. He directed me to a paper he'd delivered entitled Readers, Magazines, Playboy, Market Research: The Daniel Starch Reports as Tools for Reading Research, I read it and teed up this conversation on Zoom. Subjects covered include Daniel Starch and his Starch Reports, Soviet readership reports, Stephen Hawking, Woody Allen, free speech, Skyhorse Publishing, gay rights, Hugh Hefner, art director Art Paul, missionaries, free enterprise, Cosmopolitan Magazine, airbrushing, pornography, conventional wisdom, myths, George Orwell and populism

Enjoy!

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Michael Lista on writing true crime, and getting optioned

Thursday, July 25, 2024 • Duration 57:31

Michael Lista is an investigative journalist, essayist and poet who lives in Toronto. I've followed his career now for some fifteen years. He's written true crime for the better part of a decade. His story "The Sting" is being adapted by Adam Perlman, Robert Downey Jr., and Team Downey, into a television series for Apple TV+.

We talk here about Michael's recent book of true crime stories, The Human Scale; about Truman Capote and the non-fiction novel; about listening and details; being honest when talking with people who've experienced crises, and how tawdry it is to ask for exclusivity; about examining systems, and how tardy the delivery of justice can sometimes be; about how the story resides in the telling, and how Shakespeare stuck his landings; about in extremis and understanding who we really are; fact-checked fairy tales; competing against YouTube and Netflix; and much more.

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Ian Birch on great magazine covers

Friday, June 21, 2024 • Duration 56:38

Ian Birch is "former editorial director of Hearst UK and Emap. He began his magazine career in the late 1970s as a reporter for Melody Maker before moving to Smash Hits where he was assistant editor for three years. His first launch and editorship came in the late 1980s with Sky Magazine. At Hearst UK he was publisher of Company, Esquire and Harper's Bazaar. Prior to working at Hearst, Birch was chief content officer at TV Guide in New York for four years; and before this he was editorial director at Emap for more than 10 years, where he helped to launch Red, Closer, [and] Grazia."

His book Uncovered: Revolutionary Magazine Covers: The inside stories told by the people who made them kicks off with covers from the late 1950s, about as far back as you can go [ if you want to interview the people who both created the covers and are still alive to talk about it], and brings us up to 2017; you know, when big-run print magazines died.

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The Biblio File hosted by Nigel Beale – Details, episodes & analysis

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The Biblio File hosted by Nigel Beale – Details, episodes & analysis

Podcast details

Recent rankings

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

Shared links between episodes and podcasts

Other99+

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RSS feed quality and score

Publication history

Latest published episodes

Similar podcasts and content

Related Shows Based on Content Similarities

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

Related Shows Based on Content Similarities

Other99+

Wikipedia99+

Substack11