As one of the five men present it was not quite as daunting as envisaged to be part of the audience, although a confirmation email from the National Library, just before the event, suggesting "wear your best frock" was a little confronting! A minor complaint was that the event stretched over 90 minutes and for those (not the men) with high heels having stand all that time was a little uncomfortable given comments afterwards. It might have been better for the NLA to have had the speeches in the theatre and then followed by the cocktails and champagne.

Having said that, it was a very friendly event and the warmth of all the speakers for the book and its content was strongly inevidence. Kate Grenville said that books were part of her "life support system with cheese and biscuits".Kate concluded that if a book has an unbroken spine it has not been properly read. One admires that sentiment but true bibliophiles might disagree, depending on the format of the book. Paperbacks are ok to break! Therese Rein said that while she has a kindle ("the end or future of books") to her the book as an artefact will never be replaced.

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Amazing find at the Canberra Lifeline Book Fair.

It was interesting to read on one of the well known British book blogs the following entry from 'James'

"Just a quick comment to say how much I enjoy your blog and how true your comments are on library sales. A similar phenomenon in Australia are the charity bookfairs, and the best ones are the Lifeline bookfairs. Here in Canberra Lifeline holds two fairs every year, in Autumn and Spring. I've been living in Canberra for 15 years and I haven't missed one yet. Over the years I've picked up some nice things - as you say, usually in the form of vintage paperbacks and older books, which they're a bit sniffy about. Gates open at 10am but I'm usually there just after 8am after dropping the kids off at school. Already, by that time, there are 100 people ahead of me, mostly dealers from Canberra and New South Wales. Apart from the main hall, in which about 150,000 books are sold on trellis tables, they have a rare book room, which opens at 12 midday.

In recent years Lifeline has released a catalogue of the rare books - here is a link to the catalogue of the Spring Fair: http://www.act.lifeline.org.au/ra rebooks.htm My eye fell on Wilkie Collins' Poor Miss Finch - not one of his better novels, but still the Bentley triple-decker 1st, 1872 - and the price was $30. Ray Russell prices it as 750 quid in his guide, and Richard Dalby in the B&MC said 800-1000 quid back in 2005. So, I lined up for the usual two hours, looked around the main hall for an hour (nothing really good - back in February someone had donated their science fiction collection, built up over 50 years, so I landed a couple of hundred 1950s and '60s paperbacks), and then joined the queue for the rare book room. Already there were 20 people in front of me and I thought I was stuffed. Fortunately, they had other books on their minds - the children's books and the Australiana. I made a bee-line for the lit section, and after some frantic searching found Poor Miss Finch. That was me for the day and happily retreated home to look at my pickings. But there is a postscript - when I got home I opened opened up the title page. At the top was the signature, "Wilkie Collins February 1872". A Google search revealed that this was Collins' own copy of the novel, sold at an auction of his library in 1890. Not a bad purchase for $30.

The entry is only signed James but Canberra bibliophiles are excellent detectives and our guess is that this is a well known Canberra expert on the Australian Gothic and maybe a member of the National Archives

http://www.bookr ide.com/2009/10/library-sales.htm l

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Kindle available to Australia

I've been invited to address the annual meeting of Unversity Co-op Bookshop Managers in Kiama next Friday on 'Digital Futures for Bookshops, Libraries and Publishers'. As part of my talk, I'll try and cover aspects of e-books and e-readers. The availablity of Amazon's Kindle in Australia has stimulated the following comment in the Weekly Book Newsletter of the Australian Bookseller and Publisher.

"As reported on Bookseller+Publisher online last Wednesday, Amazon has announced its Kindle ereader is now available to customers outside the United States, including AustraliaKindles are available to order for US$279 (A$313) from the Amazon website now and will begin shipping from 19 October to users in ‘more than 100' countries--though not yet to New Zealand.

At the time of the international Kindle launch Amazon claimed non-US users would have access to around 200,000 Kindle titles, however it appears that very few of these will be frontlist titles and that even fewer will be Australian--with Lonely Planet thus far the only Australian publisher to confirm it is making its titles available.

‘This is not a device tailored to the Australian market,' said Australian Booksellers Association CEO Malcolm Neil of the dearth of titles available to Australian Kindle users. Neil said that the lack of content, coupled with the news that Australians will pay 40% more than US users for content, meant the Kindle would not threaten Australian booksellers' sales. However, Neil told WBN he hoped the international launch of the Kindle and attendant publicity would ‘put more pressure' on local publishers to make Australian territorially protected titles available in ebook format".

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Booker prize winner Hilary Mantel covers in the UK Guardian- Wicked parents in fairy tales

"In Europe in the days when maternal mortality was high - that is, every age till very recently - a bereaved husband acted just like the father in The Tale of the Juniper Tree; he wept greatly, then he wept a bit less, then he rose and took a new wife. At some point, the child of the lost wife is sure to ask: "What did my mother die of?" In the Juniper Tree, the mother died of "joy". It's a more acceptable answer than "She died of you". But not many children, in real life or in fairytales, can have been fooled in this way. Generations have been born into blood-guilt and reared by wraiths, the dead mother hovering over the cradle, blighting the new marriage: souring the milk and cracking the bowls, starting fires in the thatch and unravelling the products of the loom. If the houses in fairytales are ever orderly, neat and safe, it is a momentary illusion; you may be sure there is a nasty surprise lurking. Do you wonder what are those savoury aromas, wafting from the hearth? That is a human head boiling.

When we read fairytales now, the tools of psychoanalysis jump to hand, like the animated dish and spoon in the nursery rhyme. But we mustn't forget the historical reality behind the stories. Step-parenting, with its grudges and feuds over right and inheritance, was a fact of life through the ages, and now, because of frequent divorce, has become a fact of life again. Modern families may not be quarrelling over inheritance, but they are still at loggerheads over who gets what share in the parent or child. We don't dismember the child for the cauldron, like the boy in the Juniper Tree, but we shred him by apportioning his time and love: weekdays with mum, weekend with dad. And in step-families, sexual tension is the great unspeakable. In the Brothers Grimm tale, Snow White is a child of seven. Her story makes more sense, of an unpalatable kind, in the versions where she is on the cusp of womanhood, a blossoming rival to her stepmother.

In life, as in the fairy stories, children will cling to even the most abusive parent. Hansel and Gretel make their way back to the couple who have tried to abandon them, and hope this time it will be different. We do not want to believe this happens in real life, but the news reports tell us it does. A casual boyfriend tortures and murders a baby while its mother stands by with, at best, glazed indifference. Normal parents cannot understand child-killers, but fairytales hold up a distorting mirror that enhances our petty guilts. There can be few mothers who, trapped with a fractious, wailing, ungrateful baby, have not wished it momentarily removed, and then become afraid of the dark powers the wish might attract.

In the Juniper Tree a father devours his own son with relish. Juniper berries, of which this small boy is partly made, are a stimulant to the appetite, yet in excess they are poisonous. But then, the whole circumstances of this boy's existence are equivocal. A dream of juniper berries foretells a male child, but to eat too many can bring on uterine contractions. After the muddled father mistakes his son for his dinner, a saviour sibling comes to the rescue. As Marina Warner has pointed out, the little girl acts like a priestess in the ritual arrangement of her brother's bones. The boy comes back to life in smoke and flame; juniper berries produce a good deal of oily smoke and are favoured in rituals where an illusion must be produced, a forgotten face and form reconfigured. This story about ancient magic and folk medicine has somehow combined itself with a story about revenge on a wicked stepmother. But it is not surprising that a tree, with its resins, mists, perfumes and exhalations, is the central character.

The journey into the wood is part of the journey of the psyche from birth through death to rebirth. Hansel and Gretel, the woodcutter's children, are familiar with the wood's verges but not its heart. Snow White is abandoned in the forest. What happens to us in the depths of the wood? Civilisation and its discontents give way to the irrational and half-seen. Back in the village, with our soured relationships, we are neurotic, but the wood releases our full-blown madness. Birds and animals talk to us, departed souls speak. The tiny rush-light of the cottages is only a fading memory. Lost in the extinguishing darkness, we cannot see our hand before our face. We lose all sense of our body's boundaries. We melt into the trees, into the bark and the sap. From this green blood we draw new life, and are healed". More at

http://www.guardian.co.uk /books/2009/oct/10/fairytales-hil ary-mantel

The fairytale of Mossycoat is retold by Philip Pullman in The UK Observer,

http://www.guardian.co.uk/b ooks/2009/oct/11/fairytales-mossy coat-philip-pullman/print

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Borders: 100 Favourite Books of All Time

WBN reports "Borders this week announced its 100 Favourite Books of All Time, as voted for by customers.Subscribers to the Borders e-newsletter were asked to vote for their favourite book throughout June and July, with one winner taking home a prize of the entire collection of the 100 favourite books. More than 33,000 subscribers responded during the month of July.

The top three on the list were the classics Pride and Prejudice, To Kill a Mockingbird and Lord of the Rings. In fourth place came My Sister's Keeper (Jodi Picoult, A&U), possibly influenced by the recent release of the film version. Perhaps not as surprisingly--this was followed by bestselling series ‘Twilight' and ‘Harry Potter'.

There were 16 Australian books among the 100 favourites, which included The Book Thief (Markus Zusak, Pan Macmillan) at eighth place, Shantaram: A Novel (Gregory David Roberts, Pan Macmillan) at 13th and the classic Cloudstreet (Tim Winton, Penguin) at 20th.

‘While an abundance of traditional literary classics unsurprisingly took out the top positions, it was interesting to see the relatively new wave of modern authors such as Dan Brown and Twilight author Stephenie Meyer within the top 20', Downer told WBN. 'It was also great to see that Australian classic literary authors Tim Winton and Bryce Courtenay remain well-loved by our readers, with both authors being positioned in the top 20.'

Top 10 books on the list

1. Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen, various imprints)

2. To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee, various imprints)

3. Lord of the Rings (JRR Tolkien, HarperCollins)

4. My Sister's Keeper (Jodi Picoult, A&U)

5. ‘Twilight' saga (Stephanie Meyer, Little, Brown)

6. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (J K Rowling, Bloomsbury)

7. The Time Traveler's Wife (Audrey Niffenegger, Random House)

8. The Book Thief (Marcus Zusak, Pan Macmillan)

9. Nineteen Eighty Four (George Orwell, Penguin)

10. Magician (Raymond E Feist, HarperCollins)"

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F or this month's UK Bookseller Digital Focus, experts use their time machines and then report back from the near and far-flung future.

Bill Thompson, journalist and expert commentator on the BBC World Service's "Digital Planet" pictures the world beyond Google; Timo Hannay, publishing director of Macmillan's Nature.com, imagines the intelligent book; Naomi Alderman, winner of the 2006 Orange Award for New Writers for her novel Disobedience (Viking) and writer for games such as alternate reality game Perplex City, looks forward to new hybrid forms of writing; performance poet Ross Sutherland muses on the future for his artform; if:book's director Chris Meade visits the Unlibrary; and Sasha Hoare, who has worked on literature and education projects at the South Bank, for Booktrust and with Michael Rosen during his children's laureateship, explains in detail how HOTbook may develop present and future writers in schools.All at

http://www.thebookseller. com/in-depth/feature/99589-digita l-focus-looking-forward.html

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US Library of Congress' Digital Collection One of World's Largest

The U.S. Library of Congress is well known for being the world's largest library. That is, in the traditional,

paper format. Now, the library is on the way to hosting the largest digital collection in the world with more than 700

terabytes of data. Full article at

http://lisnews.org/node/3 4820/

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Cliv e James: 'Show business has fuelled my work as a poet and a critic. The limelight is in my nature. I wasn't in any way shamed by living this double life'

From the Interview by James Campbell in the The Guardian

"Showbusiness has fuelled my work as a poet and critic, of that I'm absolutely sure. First of all, the limelight is in my nature. I already knew that this was going to form material that I was lucky to have. It would certainly fuel my memoirs. It got me out of the ivory tower. I would have choked up there. I wasn't in any way shamed by the fact that I was living this double life."

The poet and editor Anthony Thwaite, who published James's poems in Encounter, says of his multiple personalities: "He likes being famous, but the truth is I don't think he's all that good at it, the TV stuff and so on. I never really liked it. He's at his best in his literary guise. Clive's an extremely wise and entertaining critic, and a very skilful poet." Thwaite recalls his review of an early collection of James's literary essays: "I said that one of the things that contemporary criticism doesn't do, on the whole, is make you laugh. Clive does." More at

http://www.guardian.co.uk /culture/2009/oct/10/clive-james- life-in-books

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6 Ways We Gave Up Our Privacy

Privacy has long been seen as a basic, sacred right. But in the Web 2.0 world, where the average user is addicted to Google apps, GPS devices, their BlackBerry or iPhone, and such social networking sites as Facebook and Twitter, that right is slowly and willingly being chipped away. In fact, some security experts believe it's gone already. Adding to this sobering reality is that public and private entities have a growing array of tools to track our movements, habits and choices. RFID tags are on more of the items we take for granted. Those discount cards you use at the grocery store offer companies an excellent snapshot of the choices you make.

http://lisnews.org/node/348 60/ <

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Odd Book Title

Carnivorous Butterflies. Austin Hobart Clark. Washington. USGPO. 1926

Not in Libraries Australia but in WorldCat.org at www.worldcat.org/oclc/29157029.