The Proprietor

Your host is an antiquarian bookseller in Zürich, which is a respectable way of saying he spends his mornings in flea markets and his evenings with the Gesamtkatalog der Wiegendrucke. He buys books other people have given up on, identifies them properly, and occasionally discovers that the give-uppers were badly mistaken. The podcast exists because the best of these stories were being wasted on dinner guests.

As for the name: anarchival is what archive theorists, after Derrida, call the disorderly forces inside every collection — the entropy that misfiles, disperses, and forgets. We are not against archives. We simply note that they leak, and we wait downstream with a net.

In the trade, the proprietor operates as Libris Vesanis — a separate establishment with its own catalogue and its own manners. The podcast is where the manners come off.