This Site
"Musings on the Book, Literature, Poetry, Literary Criticism, Collecting, Media, Life and the Arts, and Audio Interviews pertaining to same by a writer, broadcaster, bibliophile. In short, a commonplace book blog: A place to quote, abridge, and commonplace passages of rhetorical, dialectic and factual interest, mix them with comment and reflection, and index them to facilitate retrieval and use, notably in the composition of my own prose." This site grew out of a desire to share thoughts, enthusiasms, and musings on, for and about literature, poetry and the book."
Several years ago a close friend of mine left to teach at a university in the Maritimes; his departure left a void. We had been meeting monthly, on and off, for about ten years. Mostly we met, usually with one or two others, to discuss the plays of Shakespeare. I miss those rich encounters. To compensate I decided to launch a radio program featuring interviews with authors and other book related professionals. I called it The Biblio File. Coincidental to this I started blogging. As I consider it now, I see this site as serving two purposes:
1) A place for me to store ideas. A kind of commonplace book:
"A commonplace book is what a provident poet cannot subsist without, for this proverbial reason, that "great wits have short memories:" and whereas, on the other hand, poets, being liars by profession, ought to have good memories; to reconcile these, a book of this sort, is in the nature of a supplemental memory, or a record of what occurs remarkable in every day’s reading or conversation. There you enter not only your own original thoughts, (which, a hundred to one, are few and insignificant) but such of other men as you think fit to make your own, by entering them there."
A Letter of Advice to a Young Poet from Jonathan Swift.
2) A place to house the interviews I conduct. These interviews attempt to document what’s going on with the book, as art (their contents) and object, at the turn of the 21st century, by capturing and presenting the ideas of passionate, talented authors, publishers, booksellers, collectors, conservators, illustrators, digitizers, librarians – with the goal of creating a place where interested parties can visit to get a comprehensive, entertaining, informative overview of what’s happening, real time, at this crucial stage in the book’s development.
