‘When I think about picture books,’ writes Mark Rafidi in the first line of his foreword, ‘the words of the young girl in David Legge’s Bamboozled strikes [sic] me immediately.’ What strikes me immediately is that Standing on the Shoulders of Giants is a book that hasn’t been properly edited. By the time I reached the final page I wondered if the book had been edited at all.

Rafidi has interviewed twenty Australian writers and illustrators of picture books, all of them talented and arguably all with some claim to being called ‘great’, if not ‘giants’, although one was completely unknown to me and the list was missing a couple of others I would have included – Bob Graham, who recently collected a Prime Minister’s Literary Award, for one. Rafidi lists them alphabetically on the cover.