Bad art is where the personality of the artist reveals itself most fascinatingly, according to Lord Henry Wootton, the Wildean aesthete in The Picture of Dorian Gray. It is an idea that assumes an unexpected relevance as we reach the tenth anniversary of what is perhaps the strangest phenomenon in Australian publishing history.

November 1991 saw the publication of Chopper: From the Inside, the ‘confessions’ of the notoriously violent career criminal Mark Brandon Read, who, at the time, was a maximum-security prisoner at Pentridge Prison. Read recounts his long career as a standover man and underworld executioner, occupations he pursued both in and out of prison.

Published cheaply by an obscure press that declines to give an office address, Chopper: From the Inside has been reprinted nearly thirty times in the last ten years. Read has published eight further books, all of which have been reprinted at least once, and which have combined sales claimed in the hundreds of thousands. Read’s books, moreover, have inspired one of the most critically and commercially successful Australian films of the past decade.