William Nicholson, Bookplate for the publisher William Heinemann, Woodcut, 1897

I plan to conduct a series of Biblio File interviews exclusively for subscribers to The Book Hunter Press’s database of Used Bookstores & Reviews. Each will feature conversations with experts on the histories of these (and other) British publishers (taken from First Editions of Today published by Elkin Mathews in 1928). If you, or anyone you know, are such an expert, please do contact me. 

Thanks.

(The ‘&’ key hasn’t seen such action in years):

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Oak Knoll Books – specialists in books on books – was founded in 1976 by Bob Fleck, a chemical engineer by training, who let his hobby get the best of him. Oak Knoll Press, the publishing arm of the business was established two years later.

Today, the thriving company maintains an inventory of about 23,000 titles. Specialities include books about bibliography, book collecting, book design, book illustration, book selling, bookbinding, bookplates, children’s books, Delaware books, fine press books, forgery, graphic arts, libraries, literary criticism, marbling, papermaking, printing history, publishing, typography & type specimens, and writing & calligraphy – plus books about the history of all of these fields.

I met  with Bob recently to talk about the story of his company, about his love of books, of A. Edward Newton, of traveling the globe to meet fellow bibliophiles, of visiting used bookstores, and of the plan Bob has to partner with Between the Covers, The Kelmscott Bookshop, and The Old Bookshop of Bordentown,  to convert the second story of his existing premises into a new store called The Bookshop in Old New Castle. Grand Opening: May 1 (Click here to see a slide-show of the remodeling process). Please listen here:

Subscribe to Nigel Beale’s Biblio File Podcast here

Copyright © 2010 by Nigel Beale. www.nigelbeale.com

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Neil Gaiman, Mark Haddon, Chuck Palahniuk, and Joanna Cole of Magic School Bus fame are among those included in this list of famous author interviews.

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According to AppAdvice  Apple has imported the entire Project Gutenberg library of over 30,000 out-of-copyright books into iTunes, making it very easy, apparently, for iPad owners to access them. Apple’s $9.99 bestseller price puts the iTunes book store in direct competition with Amazon’s e-book store and the iPad head-to-head with Kindle. While the Kindle can also read the ePub format from Project Gutenberg, users reportedly have to go through a more convoluted download process to get books to the device.

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I had the pleasure of meeting Mark Samuels Lasner when I was down in Florida recently. Among other things we talked about beautiful books, and what to collect (stay tuned for the audio). He suggested John Lane’s Keynote Series published in the 1890s, many of which contain Aubrey Beardsley designs. Here’s the list:

Vol 1 Keynotes by George Egerton
Vol 2 The Dancing Faun by Florence Farr
Vol 3 Poor Folk. Translated from the Russian of F. Dostoievsky by Lena Milman. With a preface by George Moore.
Vol 4 A Child of the Age by Francis Adams
Vol 5 The Great God Pan and The Inmost Light by Arthur Machen
Vol 6 Discords by George Egerton
Vol 7 Prince Zaleski by M.P. Shiel
Vol 8 The Woman Who Did by Grant Allen
Vol 9 Women’s Tragedies by H.D. Lowry
Vol 10 Grey Roses/The Bohemian Girl and Other Stories by Henry Harland
Vol 11 At the First Corner and Other Stories by H.B. Marriott Watson
Vol 12 Monochromes by Ella D’Arcy
Vol 13 At the Relton Arms by Evelyn Sharp
Vol 14 The Girl from the Farm by Gertrude Dix
Vol 15 The Mirror of Music by Stanley V. Makower
Vol 16 Yellow and White by W. Carlton Dawe
Vol 17 The Mountain Lovers by Fiona Macleod
Vol 18 The Woman Who Didn’t by Victoria Crosse
Vol 19 The Three Imposters by Arthur Machen
Vol 20 Nobody’s Fault by Netta Syrett
Vol 21 The British Barbarians by Grant Allen
Vol 22 In Homespun by E. Nesbit
Vol 23 Platonic Affections by John Smith
Vol 24 Nets for the Wind by Una Taylor
Vol 25 Where the Atlantic Meets the Land by Caldwell Lipsett
Vol 26 In Scarlet and Grey by Florence Henniker. (With The Spectre of the Real by Florence Henniker and Thomas Hardy)
Vol 27 Maris Stella by Marie Clothilde Balfour
Vol 28 Day Books by Mabel E. Wotton
Vol 29 Shapes in the Fire by M.P. Shiel
Vol 30 Ugly Idol by Claud Nicholson
Vol 31 Kakemonos by W. Carlton Dawe
Vol 32 God’s Failures by J.S. Fletcher
Vol 33 A Deliverance by Allan Monkhouse
Vol 34 Mere Sentiment by A. J. Dawson

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This from the latest issue of Guerilla Magazine, #23

Boldly creative and obsessively organized, Adrian Göllner is a man of two minds—and he draws upon both of them to win public art commissions all over the world.

Story by Nigel Beale  /  Photographs by Rémi Thériault

Several years ago I went through the Ron Mueck exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada. The sculptures, so meticulously human and life-like, were either huge or tiny. Despite breathtakingly accurate renderings of human flesh, eyelashes, toenails and hair follicles, if the works had been life-sized, the appeal would have evaporated.

The same somehow holds true of great fiction, where words themselves serve to distort or magnify reality. In so doing they hold us rapt.

Mueck’s sculptures fascinate us because, while we know they aren’t human (as we know, too, that words in a novel don’t produce real people), they so closely resemble the real thing that we puzzle over them, marvel at their verisimilitude, strain at the tension between likeness and difference, real and imagined, familiar and strange.

It is exactly this duality—this blur between the real and the unreal—that most interests Ottawa’s Adrian Göllner. His progressive rise to prominence through the winning of international public art commissions is rooted in a double nature driven by curiosity and artistry.

In the early 1990s, after George Bush Sr.’s invasion of Iraq, CNN started hawking a set of Desert Storm videos highlighting the “very best” of its Gulf War coverage. As Göllner recalls, you couldn’t at first figure out if the videos were for real or just some kind of parody; a joke; war served up in a neat infotainment package for consumption in the comfort of your living room.

The unintentionally farcical nature of the CNN videos inspired Göllner, whose army-base childhood in Germany had left him preoccupied with the Cold War (the artist’s military father was on assignment there “preparing for World War III” for much of Göllner’s early life.)

Riffing off this farce/fact dichotomy, Göllner created a series of Cold War trading cards, complete with bomb-testing stats, warnings about which countries not to piss off, and advice on how to prevent the “Reds” from taking over. The cards were convincing enough to keep people guessing (crass commercial product or parody?) and sold briskly. The Deifenbunker tourist attraction located just outside of Ottawa took 100 sets and invited Göllner to do a similarly themed on-site installation.

Adrian Göllner was photographed in front of Stand, the glass wall installation he created as part of the City of Ottawa’s Shenkman Arts Centre in Orleans.

Exposure here, and through a public commission he’d completed in Kitchener, Ontario, got Göllner a shot at another large prize, this one connected with construction of the Canadian embassy in Berlin. Göllner included his faux anti-communist propaganda materials as part of the bid and won the project. Using the propaganda “meant that I knew what Berlin meant,” reasoned Göllner.

In this instance and many others, Göllner’s ability to understand context, to research and grasp the import of architectural design and intent, and to come up with compelling-yet-elemental ideas has helped him win vaunted public art commissions all over the globe.

But there is another, equally important aspect driving Göllner’s success: his meticulous organizational skills.

“Public work is about 20% art… please read the rest here in the latest issue of Guerilla magazine.

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Guerilla magazine and the National Gallery of Canada team up to present:

• Live performance by Ottawa’s legendary Hammerheads band
  An intimate piano-and-vocals set by the charming Megan Jerome
  Free tours of the National Gallery’s Nicolas Baier exhibition
  A hands-on silk screening workshop
  An instructional African drumming session with Dr. Lee
  A slide presentation preview of Martin Lipman’s photo portraits of Governor General Award-winning artists
  And…the launch of Guerilla #23 online and in print which contains an article by me on Ottawa artist Adrian Gollner.

Photo: Nigel Beale.

Richard Holloway is a Scottish writer/broadcaster  and former Bishop of Edinburgh in the Scottish Episcopal Church who was educated at Kelham Theological College and the Union Theological Seminary, New York City. Between 1959 and 1986 he was curate, vicar and rector at parishes in England, Scotland and the United States, at which point he became the Bishop of Edinburgh, a position he resigned from in 2000. Now an outspoken commentator on religious belief in the modern world, he is author of more than 20 books, well-known for his support of liberal causes, including human rights for gays and lesbians in and outside of the church. Holloway lives in Edinburgh with his American-born wife Jean. They have three adult children.

We talk here about one of his most recent books, Between the Monster and the Saint, as he puts it: ‘a gradual plea for self awareness and forgiveness, and through this, tolerance and compassion toward others.

(Subscribe to Nigel Beale’s Biblio File Podcast here)

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Photo: Nigel Beale.

Nicholson Baker (born January 7, 1957) is an American writer of fiction and non-fiction. As a novelist he often focuses on describing the minute physical detail of our surroundings, straws and escalators for example, writing on provocative topics such as voyeurism, phone sex  and planned assassination.  Enthusiasts laud his ability to explore and illuminate the human psyche, critics call him a boring gadfly. Much of his non-fiction deals with the printed word, how it’s presented, stored, consumed. 

We talk here about the future of the book, ebooks, the ipad, the Kindle, brodart dust jacket covers, Daniel Dafoe, bloggers, CIA, weapons scientists at the Library of Congress, letterpress printing and the pulling of books off shelves.

Please listen here:

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