Andrew Nash on the value of Publishers' Archives
The Biblio File hosted by Nigel Beale
Release Date: 10/08/2023
Timothy Heyman on B. Traven and how to manage a literary archive
The Biblio File hosted by Nigel Beale
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? ...
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David McKnight on Collecting The Beatles
The Biblio File hosted by Nigel Beale
Some years ago 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 . 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...
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Michael Erdman on the history of magazines (and women's rights) in Turkey
The Biblio File hosted by Nigel Beale
Michael Erdman is Head of 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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Michael Erdman on the history of magazines (and women's rights) in Turkey
The Biblio File hosted by Nigel Beale
Michael Erdman is Head of 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
The Biblio File hosted by Nigel Beale
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...
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Tony Fekete on Collecting Erotica
The Biblio File hosted by Nigel Beale
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...
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Siegfried Lukatis on Insel Bucherei, the iconic German book series
The Biblio File hosted by Nigel Beale
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 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...
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Richard Charkin on Lessons Learned from 50 Years in Book Publishing
The Biblio File hosted by Nigel Beale
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 . He is former President of The Book Society, the International Publishers Association and the UK Publishers Association. His book My Back Pages, 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...
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Book scholar Jonathan Rose on who used to read Playboy magazine and Why
The Biblio File hosted by Nigel Beale
The last time I ran into renowned book scholar Jonathan Rose () 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...
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Michael Lista on writing true crime, and getting optioned
The Biblio File hosted by Nigel Beale
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, 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...
info_outlineAndrew Nash is Reader in Book History at the Institute of English Studies, University of London (a leading book history scholar in other words) and Director of the London Rare Books School.
We sat down in the stacks at the Mark Longman "Books about Books" Library at the University of Reading (well, actually the Museum of English Rural Life in Reading which is somehow connected to the University and its publishers' archives collections) to talk about a course Andrew teaches at the London Rare Book School on how to use/work with publishers' archives.
Though this topic may sound a tad niche, even for this podcast, it's not. Andrew makes the convincing case that publishers' archives are in fact of interest to many scholars, and have value precisely because they can be studied from many different economic, social, and cultural perspectives. Publishers' archives yield, among other things, fascinating, detailed information about how knowledge and "culture" is “made public” in society. They’re not just about author-publisher correspondences, though these in themselves are justly recognized and valued as essential documents of cultural heritage, no, they’re about providing scholars, and the world at large, with rich source documentation, from which all of us can better understand...yes, everything!
Archives referenced during our conversation include those of Allen & Unwin, Chatto and Windus, Longmans, John Murray, George Routledge, and The Hogarth Press.