Kevin Gilmartin is a professor of English at California Institute of Technology, and visiting professor at the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies at York University in England.  He is the author of Print Politics: The Press and Radical Opposition in Early Nineteenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1996) and Writing against Revolution: Literary Conservatism in Britain, 1790-1832 (Cambridge, 2007), and the co-editor with James Chandler of Romantic Metropolis: The Urban Scene of British Culture, 1780-1840 (Cambridge, 2005).  His essays have appeared in such journals as Studies in Romanticism, ELH, and The Journal of British Studies, and in several essay collections.  His research interests include Romantic literature, the politics of literary culture, the history of the periodical press and of print culture, and intersections between literary expression and public activism.

We talked recently at length about 18th century British essayist/critic William Hazlitt. Please listen here:

Richard Coxford is the proprietor of Bytown Bookshop in Ottawa, Canada. He has been collecting fine/press books for many years. We talk here about their history, and the joys and challenges of hunting them down.

Richard Landon is Director of the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library and Professor of English. He has taught courses on aspects of the history of the book and bibliography for many years in the University of Toronto’s Graduate Department of English and the Faculty of Information. Among his recent publications are Bibliophilia Scholastica Floreat (2005), Ars Medica (2006), ‘Two Collectors: Thomas Grenville and Lord Amherst of Hackney’ in Commonwealth of Books (2007), ‘The Elixir of Life: Richard Garnett, the British Museum Library, and Literary London’ in Literary Cultures and the Material Book (2007), and articles in the History of the Book In Canada (2004-2007).

We met recently in his office

to talk about his career, the role of a rare books librarian, the Encyclopédie, changes that have occurred in the market place, collecting as scholarship, Charles Darwin, Galileo, Copernicus, the future of the Thomas Fisher collection, ebooks, books about books, unpublished medieval texts and limitless collecting possibilities. Please listen here: