Success was a god with a single profile, and it wasn’t directed at the past.
—Michelle de Kretser, Questions of Travel

Two years ago a set of portable book-shelves appeared in the foyer of my local library in small-town rural Queensland. Stacked with bright, important-looking volumes, a laminated card invited the public to ‘Help Yourself’. These unwanted children were to be given away or, failing that, discarded altogether. There were handsome monographs on Goya and Rembrandt; a History of Kosovo; an inevitably chunky biography of Tolstoy; another, equally hefty, of Australian poet John Shaw Neilson; an illustrated History of the Apocalypse; an illustrated History of Blood. ‘No-one has borrowed any of them for years,’ the head librarian explained regretfully. ‘And we simply don’t have room.’