The Biblio File hosted by Nigel Beale

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 ...

 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 languag...

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; ...

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...

Paul Wells is a leading Canadian political journalist and author. We met at his offices in Ottawa to talk about his impressive career, and his craft writing about politics for newspapers, magazines, books, and now Substack. Topics covered include: observing and interviewing politicians; reading and remembering history; putting events into context; pre-revolutionary Paris; pedagogical magazine writing; help...

“Lucian Bernhard (1883-1972) was one of the great founders of modern graphic design. In a career spanning nearly five decades in Berlin and New York, Bernhard laid the foundation for a new language of form and communication. His brilliant posters, advertisements, book designs and typefaces created the very look of the twentieth century and beyond. In this lavishly illustrated book, noted design historian Christopher Long traces Ber...

I interviewed Nick Anthony a year or so ago about his experience writing a first novel and getting parts of it work-shopped. Today I catch up with him to find out what he’s been doing and where he’s at now on the road to getting his first book published.

We talk about, among other things, how AI has helped him in the writing process; subjective and objective readers; the difference between screen writing and novel writing; Noam Cho...

John Sargent was too young to fight in WW ll but he spent years battling Amazon and Google in the trenches on behalf of publishers and authors, protecting copyright and defending book prices.

John grew up on a cattle ranch in Wyoming. Over forty years he worked at six publishing companies, including Simon & Schuster where he was the publisher of the Children’s Division, and Dorling Kindersley where he was CEO. For the last half of ...