Our guest is Oliver Darkshire, the author of Once Upon a Tome: The Misadventures of a Rare Bookseller. Once Upon a Tome is a memoir about Oliver’s experiences of working at Henry Sotheran’s – a quintessential antiquarian bookshop in London, which has been in business since 1761.

We speak to architectural historian Catherine W. Zipf about the Green Book, which was an important travel guide for African Americans during the Jim Crow era. It listed hotels, restaurants, gas stations, and other businesses that welcomed black travelers in this period of segregation. Catherine is working on a project to record and study all the historical sites listed in the Green Books between 1938 and 1967.

Our guest is author and copywriter Louise Willder, and we are talking about blurbs – those little snippets of promotional text on the covers of books. Louise has been a copywriter at Penguin for more than 25 years and estimates she has written around 5,000 blurbs. She is the author Blurb Your Enthusiasm: An A-Z of Literary Persuasion, which details her experiences as a copywriter. We discuss the rules of blurbs, troublesome authors, revisiting Lolita, Lace by Shirley Conran and much more.