Reading and writing, for me, are like two playing cards pushed between opposite spokes of a pushbike wheel. In motion, the cards blur into one striped replica of smooth transference; when still, they are airlessly separate. One is vital to the other but their successful interchange is necessarily subtle, momentary and the gift of not so much a backwards glance as a puzzled glare.

There’s certainly a glare in the backwards look Geordie Williamson gives to what he regards as this nation’s neglect of its literary legacy. The Burning Library’s deliberately provocative first pages puts forcefully that our tertiary institutions have under-taught even our most significant writers. The introduction’s cry of alarm has snagged a large share of reviewers’ attention, overshadowing the rest of the book. This is a real pity, as the best argument for paying due attention to the best of yesterday’s voices is the supple analysis in the pages beyond. From the somatic near-baroque of Patrick White to the spare, circular minimalism of Gerard Murnane, Williamson surveys six female and eight male writers via fifteen to twenty page pen portraits, each chapter appositely accompanied with linocut likenesses of the author from that very considerable designer, W.H. Chong. Williamson’s vignettes are remarkable in their ability to both limn each author’s character and to suffuse key aspects of their work with a new vividness. M. Bernard Eldershaw’s 1947 speculative novel Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow is described as ‘…offering a premonitory shiver’, such are its resonances with the Occupy movement and rising general disgust at political spin. Randolph Stow is drawn as ‘…sheltering…a single soul [with a] melancholy awareness of the insurmountable gulf that exists between others and ourselves.’ Whatever one thinks of the author selection (I couldn’t help but wonder how Williamson would essay Thea Astley or Elizabeth Jolley, amongst others), you can’t deny the erudition so lightly placed here in the service of the common, curious reader.