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When Graeme Base’s first picture book, My Grandma Lived in Gooligulch, was published in 1983, his exuberant illustrations and rollicking text produced a frisson. However, it was the incomparable ‘alphabet’ book Animalia (1986) that really launched Base’s career as a picture-book author–illustrator, and made him a publishing phenomenon in both Australia and the United States. In celebration of twenty-five years of Graeme Base picture books, his publisher, Penguin, has produced a glossy retrospective look at his work. Written by Julie Watts, a former editor and publisher at Penguin Books, The Art of Graeme Base is lavishly illustrated and engagingly written. The first chapter documents Base’s idyllic childhood in Britain and his migration to Australia with his family. The second charts his early adult life as a struggling graphic designer, aspiring rock star and budding illustrator. These chapters introduce the many talents, enthusiasms, influences and mentors that have shaped the Graeme Base ‘brand’. The next twelve chapters are devoted to in-depth revelations about the evolution and production of each of Base’s twelve books, including his most recent title, Enigma (2008). Many chapters also have a ‘Beyond the Book’ section, which explores the other formats that the indefatigable Base has ventured into as spin-offs from his books: television series, board books, dioramas, exhibitions and stage plays.

Sir James Murray, the famous editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, believed that the dictionary-maker’s job was to furnish each word with a biography.

Two months ago, I was in Islamabad to address an international conference on suicide terrorism. The Pakistani army was engaged in heavy fighting with the Islamic militants in the Pashtun-dominated northern Pakistan, bordering Afghanistan. The security situation was deteriorating. Senior Pakistani intelligence officers were worried that it would lead to an escalation of suicide attacks. Their assessment was supported by the other government officials, including doctors working in the region, who told me of the widespread perception among Pashtuns that the predominantly Punjabi Pakistan army was committing genocide of the Pashtun nation and was thus turning the population against the army. The aerial bombings by Pakistani helicopter gunships and the US-NATO drones were causing many civilian casualties.

Marisa Raoul’s memoir recounts the ten years she spent living and working with her husband in France. With French travel memoirs lining bookshop shelves – such as Ellie Nielsen’s Buying a Piece of Paris (2007), Mark Greenside’s I’ll Never Be French (no matter what I do) and Lucy Knisley’s French Milk (both 2008) and, of course, Peter Mayle’s wildly popular A Year in Provence (1991) – Raoul is treading safe, and commercially viable, waters.

In May 1965 the Victorian police raided a nondescript terrace house in East Melbourne. They were tracking illegal abortionists. Two doctors, one an outgoing social figure, bold and brassy, the other a quiet, studious man, were performing abortions on the premises. They had refused to pay protection money, and probably the raid was inevitable. The police rampaged about, taking files and notes, and eventually found three young and very groggy women who were clearly recovering from anaesthetic. The quick-thinking women claimed to be recovering from pelvic examinations, but the police were not fooled, and the women were rushed off to the Royal Women’s Hospital where a doctor probed them and their photographs were taken, legs apart. While the women were enduring this undignified end to their surgery, the doctors too were in trouble. With good lawyers, their hearings were adjourned, but they returned to their old work, a little more quietly, but still performing abortions.

In 2006, forty years after the publication of his first novel, Rappaport, which featured the comic misadventures of a Melbourne Jewish antique dealer, Morris Lurie was awarded the Patrick White Award. He is one of those remarkably durable Australian writers who have extended their careers into a fifth decade. Principally known as a short story writer, published widely in Australia, but also in the New Yorker, Punch and, appropriately, the Transatlantic Review, Lurie’s latest work is his first book of fiction since Seventeen Versions of Jewishness: Twenty Examples in 2001. From Hybrid Publications, To Light Attained is, in its formal essence and central moral issue, a novella, and a fine one.

Bright comedians quickly learn that to explain a joke is to deprive it of its humour. If the gag doesn’t make an audience laugh without a laboured punchline, a good performer will swiftly modify her delivery for greater effect.

There are many good reasons for destroying books. Not every act of destruction is an attempt to suppress ideas. Publishers pulp excess stocks of unsold titles; booksellers and libraries do it; even you and I do it. You don’t want to keep every school textbook you ever owned, and the nice people down at the Op Shop won’t thank you for dumping your discards on them. Our state and national libraries keep publishers’ deposit copies of every book produced in their jurisdictions – these are copies of last resort. If you attack them, you are attacking the cultural memory of human- kind; if you empty your own book- shelves onto a bonfire, you have merely gone overboard with spring cleaning.