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THE BIBLIO FILE is a podcast about "the book," and an inquiry into the wider world of book culture. Hosted by Nigel Beale it features wide ranging, long-form conversations with best practitioners inside the book trade and out - from writer to reader. Why listen? The hope is that it will help you to read, write, publish, edit, design, and collect better, and improve how you communicate serious, big, necessary, new, good ideas and stories...

Feedback or suggestions? Please email notabenebeale@gmail.com 

Dec 7, 2021

William (Bill) Matthews has been dealing in old & rare books, manuscripts, maps and related material since 1976. He began working for a bookshop in Saskatoon, then opened his own in Vancouver in 1976, and subsequently moved to Toronto in 1980. He was in Ontario until 1996 when he moved to San Francisco / Berkeley and was part of Peter Howard's Serendipity Books for a few years. He's now the proud owner of The Haunted Bookshop, a bricks and mortar shop in Sydney, B.C. just north of Victoria. 
 
We met in the shop to talk about Bill's career in the used book business, about young collectors; Odean Long, previous long-time owner of The Haunted Bookshop; pseudonymously and anonymously authored books; scouting trips, Acres of Books in Cincinnati, little book fairs, book scouts Martin Stone and David Sachs, Driff's Guide to All the Second-hand and Antiquarian Bookshops in Britain, fantasy fiction, booksellers Peter Howard and Bill Hoffer, the great Winnipeg book sale, Maurice Sendak, and much more. 
 
After our conversation Bill and I chatted a bit about Saskatoon, where the two of us had grown up, discovering that we'd both gone to the same high school, at the same time - in the same grade. Bill later produced the yearbook to prove it. 
 
Apologies in advance for the poor audio quality (something about soft-spoken booksellers and the acoustics of used bookstores).