Inspired by Nina Katchadourian's Sorted Books series (via) I had a look through my "To Read" shelf and came up with these. Recommended fun!

Continuing on a theme - did you know that Neil Gaiman was coming to Melbourne? Well he is, for the CBCA conference All the Wild Wonders. You can pay $800 to see him, along with many other fine notables of the children's book publishing world.

Or, you can pay $25 to hear him speak because his keynote, along with that of Shaun Tan's, is open to the public (scroll down for details). Crazy Hair!

The full text of the letter sent by Angus and Robertson, where they demand $2,500 to $100,000 to cover the gap created by an "unacceptable level of profitability" from small to mid-sized Australian publishers, has been posted online, along with a brilliant response from Michael Rakusin, director of Tower Books.

While one may be forgiven for believing that Angus & Robertson is actually a company purveying "Sale" signs, I do believe you are still in the book business?

(via Ben Peek)

Aren't they so pretty all grouped together like that?
Now I just need to figure out which one to start with.

Magic's Child (Magic Or Madness trilogy) at Amazon
Fantastic Wonder Stories at Ticonderoga
Buffy Season 8 - support your local comic book store!

I've been using Delicious Library for quite a while now, and I still recommend it for maintaining a private collection. But I thought I'd take a look at LibraryThing today and the more social side to book hoarding. I like the idea of tagging books, reviews, recommendations and of course poking around other people's stuff. So I signed up. Fortunately it has a universal import capability so I set it to upload from the convenient Delicious Library export feature and left it chugging away. Four hours later I come back to discover there is a 200 book limit on free accounts.

LibraryThing has uploaded 200 random ISBNs from the 1300+ it had to choose from. It now looks like I have a completely moronic collection, largely based around Mr Men books. Ay Carumba.

I just heard on Triple R that Shaun Tan will be discussing his latest work The Arrival at Dymocks Melbourne this Tuesday. I strongly urge anyone who has the opportunity to go hear Shaun talk about this work. It will be followed by a Q&A and signing.

The Arrival is a beautiful, wordless graphic novel of the journey of a migrant to a new land. I haven't seen the whole book yet, but I do already have a print from it hanging on my family room wall. I saw many images and heard him talk about it at Continuum earlier this year. I'm only waiting for a slightly more financial moment to get my copy.

Also, he does little drawings on the books he signs. That alone is worth going.

Buy Shaun Tan's books at Amazon.