Smart Exhibition @ TarraWarra

Container Train in Landscape

The Jeffrey Smart exhibition at TarraWarra (near Yarra Glen) is still on until the end of March, and it is well worth a visit. At this time of year it is a pleasant day out: enjoy a drive through the Yarra Valley, visit the exhibition, have lunch at the gallery's café or at one of the many other places in the area where they cater for the tourists from the Big Smoke.

Jeffrey Smart with his last documented painting, "Labyrinth", 2011

Jeffrey Smart announced his retirement from painting last year - he is ninety years old, wheelchair bound and rather frail. He still lives in the Tuscan villa where he has spent the last forty years with his partner Ermes De Zan.

Container Train in Landscape (detail)

The works on display in the Gallery's three main rooms are nominally divided into three periods, covering the painter's sojourn in Sydney from 1951, Rome in the 1960s and Tuscany from the 1970s on.

He is an Adelaide boy, having grown up during the Great Depression in a small flat on South Terrace, after his parents had to rent out their suburban house due to straitened circumstances. From the flat he could look out at alleyways and back lanes, rooftops and little side streets: an urban landscape that fascinated him. The geometry of the buildings spoke to him, and he loved to explore these alleys and laneways with his friends after school.

Yarragon Siding

He became an art teacher because his parents could not afford to send him to University to study architecture. However, his fascination with the composition and geometry of buildings, streetscapes and industrial areas have made him a master of the urban landscape. His works emphasize clean lines and precise attention to detail. Chevrons, parallel lines and geometric curves are features of his paintings. The cubist patterns of apartment blocks are complemented by the coloured squares and circles of road signs at construction sites and airports, and his portraits are set in those backgrounds rather than the more conventional setting one would expect of a portrait.

Portriat of Clive James

 "Portrait of Clive James", for example, shows a vast expanse of bright yellow corrugated steel in the foreground, dwarfing a small, distant figure showing above the parapet of an overpass above. Clive James or Franz Kafka, who can tell?  Similarly, "Alma Mahler Feeding the Birds", shows a tiny figure in a red coat, who may or may not be Alma Mahler, standing behind a railing on what appears to be an elevated roadway, while seagulls wheel in the foreground.

Alma Mahler Feeding the Birds

David Malouf is shown at an industrial site, wearing overalls and holding an orange fuel pipe. With the line of windows in a background building rising out of the top of his head, his figure forms a vertical that intersects with the horizontal line of a row of multicoloured containers, while the fuel pipe describes a parabolic curve in the foreground.

Portrait of David Malouf

Many of the paintings have figures in them, but there is always a certain sense of isolation, that reminds me of Edward Hopper's work. The figure is often that of the painter himself (he has a bit of an Alfred Hitchcock silhouette!) In one painting, he has given his friend Bruce Beresford a cameo role, standing outside a row of garages, wearing a bright orange overall. I say "cameo role" advisedly, because his paintings have a theatrical quality - they give the impression of a stage set, with an actor hitting his mark. He likes a dramatic sky: looming grey clouds of enhance the theatrical effect, but at the same time they serve to focus attention on the structures below.

Bruce Beresford

I recognised Cahill Expressway, which has been one of the showpieces of the NGV these fifty years: a portly figure in a blue suit standing near the expressway on-ramp.

Cahill Expressway

 Whenever I go to see an exhibition, here or in another Australian city, something on loan from the NGV is always included. It just makes me grateful, yet again, that we live in Melbourne where we have unlimited, free access to such a wonderfully representative collection as that of the NGV. Whatever painter, school or genre is your cup of tea, you can go and enjoy it down St Kilda Road any time you like. Free of charge. Take the kids. Better than Disney.

Morning Practice, Baia

Another work that I liked is Morning practice, Baia, depicting a man on his back, balancing a cube on this feet. Sunlight floods the picture, which is, like many of Smart's works, almost surreal.

Container Train in Landscape

My favourite painting in that show was Container Train In Landscape, on five panels, each four feet long. This picture's home is the foyer of the Arts Centre, where I am sure most of  our members have seen it many times, but it was an unexpected pleasure to see it on a long white wall all by itself. The verticals of the gum trees reminded me of Fred Williams' work, but the bright primary colours of the carriages is pure Jeffrey Smart.

Labyrinth (2011), a metre-square picture, is Jeffrey Smart's last documented painting and is exhibited here for the first time.  It shows a vast stone labyrinth that stretches to the horizon, with a solitary figure standing in it. It evokes the painter's vision of that maze of back streets that he found so fascinating as a child. This return to the childhood experience that started him on his creative journey, may well be a fitting full stop to the Jeffrey Smart oeuvre.

Radiance: The Neo-Impressionists

I would urge our members to visit this exhibition, which is at the NGV International until 17 March 2013. There is a range of pointillist works on display: not only by the main protagonists, Seurat and Signac, but also by a host of other exceptional artists: Pissarro, Maximilien Luce and Théo Van Rysselberghe among them.

I particularly liked the works by Luce and I went back to look at them a second time. The colours are glorious. Théo Van Rysselberghe's portraits also stood out, as did the collection of sublime seascapes in the dazzling light of the South of France.

The pictures in this exhibition can never be seen to their best advantage in black and white, which is why you should enjoy them at first hand. Pay a leisurely visit to our magnificent art gallery: enjoy the Radiance show, have lunch, browse the art books and postcards in the shop, enjoy a cup of tea and a biscuit in the Members' Room, stroll through the Textiles Rooms on the top floor to see the display of beautifully designed ballet tutus. Go home with a smile on your face. It's as good as a couple of Prozacs and a stiff gin, and no side effects!

This exhibition is aptly named: the paintings are really radiant - they seem almost luminous. We are accustomed to the light and colour of the Impressionists, who obtained their effects by physically mixing the pigments on the palette. The Neo-Impressionists believed that to achieve the maximum luminosity of colour, it is necessary to present the pure colours separately and allow the viewer's eye and brain to blend them.

Georges Seurat founded the style of Divisionism, in which he divided shades of colour into individual dots of pure colour placed side by side. He took a scientific approach, concerned with colour theory. Divisionism developed into Pointillism, which is founded on the same principle, but is focused less on the pure technical aspect and more on the specific style of brushwork.

The reason why the pointillist paintings of the Neo-Impressionists seem brighter that those of painters who mix their pigments before applying them to the canvas, is partly because some of the white background remains visible between the dots, but mainly it is because placing the pure colours side by side on the canvas, avoids using subtractive colour.

This is where the technical colour theory comes in: when pigments are mixed, the resultant shade is achieved by partially absorbing (or subtracting) some wavelengths of light and not others. The mixed colour we see, depends on which part of the spectrum is not subtracted, and therefore remains visible.

Looking at the glowing pictures in this exhibition, the theory certainly seems to work! Of course, the downside of pointillism is that you don't have the brushwork that gives texture to a painting.

Another departure from the Impressionist way of working, is that the Neo-Impressionists eschewed the idea of painting en plein air, placing the impressions of light and colour on the canvas as the artist saw them. The Neo-Impressionists made sketches and drawings and they painted small studies which they then used to complete their paintings in the studio. In a way that brought them back again to the classical traditions shunned by the Impressionists.

 

 

 

Francis Bacon in Sydney 2012-2013

There is still time to see the marvellous Francis Bacon exhibition at the Art Gallery of NSW! I made the pilgrimage to Sydney before Christmas and was richly rewarded for my effort.

Francis Bacon was a very prolific painter (one has to wonder how he found the time to ghost-write all Shakespeare's plays for him, not to mention the sonnets.)

There are more than fifty of his major works on show, including a number of the iconic triptychs. The scope of the exhibition covers the development of his career through five decades. We have not been fobbed of with minor works - these paintings have been sourced from major collections, including those of the Tate in London and MOMA in New York. I also saw an old friend: the NGV's "Study from the Human Body", which our members will know.

"Study From the Human Body", in the NGV, Melbourne

The exhibition includes many portraits, mainly of friends and lovers, but there is also one of the "Screaming Pope" series of Pope Innocent X, after the Velasquez portrait that obsessed Bacon.

Pope Innocent X by Velasquez, and Bacon's Screaming Pope

That screaming mouth appears in many of his works - I was interested to read recently that Bacon was fascinated with Sergei Eisenstein's "Battleship Potemkin" and that he constantly reproduced the open-mouthed scream of the injured nurse with the runaway pram on the Odessa Steps.

Screaming nurse from Battleship Potemkin

The various elements of that scene on the Odessa Steps have been referenced in so many films, paintings and novels that Eisenstein would have been a millionaire, had he received royalties. To my mind, Battleship Potemkin should rank above Citizen Kane in the All-Time Great Movies list. But I digress, we are not here to do film reviews.

Portrait of Lucian Freud

Bacon and his friend Lucien Freud painted each other many times, and there was indeed a portrait of Freud on show, but I thought it didn't look a lot like him. When I read the wall text, I saw why. Lucien Freud didn't actually sit for this portrait, Bacon painted it from a photograph. Couldn't be bothered to hunt up a photo of Freud, so he just used one of Franz Kafka that happened to be handy. (I'm planning to commission Agata to paint my portrait, as soon as I can find a good photo of Elle MacPherson.)

George Dyer's death

Bacon's violent, drug-and-alcohol-addicted lover George Dyer was the subject of several works in the exhibition, including one of the harrowing triptychs Bacon painted after Dyer's death in a hotel room in Paris. The life force leaking out of his contorted figure forms pink, amoeba-like puddles on the floor. (Another of those post-mortem triptychs, depicting Dyer writhing in agony on a beach, was sold in 2008 at Christies for $44 million.)

Photo of Henrietta Moraes, from FB's studio, and the painting from it.

I particularly liked a nude of Henrietta Moraes, a rather louche model and muse for several leading British painters of the Fifties. Lucien Freud, with whom she had a torrid affaire, painted three portraits of her and Bacon painted her at least a dozen times. This picture shows her lying on a rumpled bed, seemingly tipsy and exuding an air of sexual invitation. For a man with a gay S&M lifestyle, Bacon certainly managed to infuse his portraits of women with a lot of highly charged sexuality.

Most interesting was a row of vitrines displaying photographs of Bacon's chaotic studio, and some of its contents: references that he used for his work, including medical texts featuring horrible disfigurements and skin diseases, magazine clippings, newspaper cuttings and photographs that he used when painting portraits, all crumpled and paint-spattered, the better to contort the faces he was painting.

Self portrait

Bacon is not for the faint-hearted. His paintings are dark and disturbing, with a visceral beauty that fascinates even as it repels. Those who can look past the brutally distorted images and be receptive to the raw emotion in his vibrant and powerful paintings, will enjoy a very satisfying experience.

 

Unusual Architecture

 

Think of beautiful and unusual architecture, and the first buildings that spring to mind are the Taj Mahal (with or without Princess Diana on a marble bench), Antoni Gaudi's Sagrada Familia cathedral in Barcelona  and the Sydney Opera House.

A very lovely building, that reminds me a bit of the Opera House, is the Lotus Temple in New Delhi, India. Its 27 "petals" are similar in shape to the "sails" of the Opera House. The temple is a Bahai House of Worship, but is interdenominational in the sense that worshippers of any religion are allowed to read or chant inside it, in any language. Sermons and ceremonies are not permitted. Any religious music may be sung a capella, but no instruments may be used.

The design was inspired, as the name indicates, by the lotus flower. (I suspect it was also inspired in part by Jorn Utzon's work!) The temple, surfaced in white marble, can seat up to 2.500 people. It is surrounded by nine ponds and 26 acres of gardens.

The spectacular Opera House in Beijing certainly rivals that of Sydney for unusual design. It was designed by a Frenchman, Paul Andreu, and took seven years to build. The design is ellipsoid: a dome set in a reflective lake, so that it looks like a giant egg. The entrance to the vast glass and titanium structure is via a hallway that goes under the lake. Inside are three theatres, two seating over 2,000 people and a "small" one that seats only 1,200.

From stately elegance to frivolity and fun … in Sopot, Poland, we find Krzywy Domek, the Crooked House. Inspired by the fairy tale illustations of Jan Marcin Szancer (the Mem Fox of Poland), this jolly, cartoonish structure is not a house but a shopping centre.

It belongs in Diagon Alley, the shopping street in the Harry Potter books! I like to imagine that inside there are curious shops like Flourish and Botts' Magic Book Shop and Ollivander's Fine Wands, but I suppose in reality it's all K-Mart and Target and those kiosks where they want to sell you a mobile phone that can play chess and launch a rocket ship.

As someone who has spent a large slice of my life in libraries (on both sides of the counter), my favourite unusual building has to be the Kansas City Public Library. The "community bookshelf" which runs along the south wall of the building, showcases 22 book spines, eight meters high and two wide. It clads the multistorey car park, so it is not obscuring any windows in the library itself.

The selected titles were voted for by the local community and provides an interesting view of what the good citizens of Kansas City like to read. The chosen works include such iconic books as Catch 22, To Kill a Mockingbird and The Silent Spring. Shakespeare, Dickens and Tolkien get a guernsey, but Tolstoy, Hemingway and Joyce don't. The only poetry is that of Langston Hughes.  What, no Keats?

The non-fiction includes the Journals of Lewis and Clark and a biography of Harry Truman. Go figure.  Is he the most interesting American president? Weell, I suppose he does hold the record for obliterating cities and killing people. Maybe George Bush killed more, but it took him a few years. Harry did it in one fell swoop. OK, two swoops. Anyway, they love him in Kansas.

There are eight children's titles, among them Winnie the Pooh and The Wizard of Oz. Dr Seuss makes the cut, but Lewis Carroll doesn't.

I wonder what a WAS Community Bookshelf would look like? Let's find out! E-mail me your choice of three favourite adult and three children's books (fiction or non-fiction) and I'll compile a list. Get your friends and family to vote too: we need a lot of entries so we can be sure of getting it right before we start putting up the scaffolding round the Highway Gallery!

Happy and Glorious

Karsh of Ottawa

In this Jubilee Year it seems fitting that we should look at portraits of Her Majesty. She is, after all, our Queen too. Long to reign over us, until she goes to join her predecessors in St George's Chapel, Windsor.  After that … who knows? But I suspect I'll search my purse in vain for an Australian coin with King Charles III's profile on it.

Monarchs have always been able to commission the services of the foremost painters of their day - the trick was to be a contemporary of the great masters. Up to the Plantaganets, there are really no royal portraits that excite me greatly, and indeed it is accepted that the images of the Norman and Plantagenet kings are probably fictitious.

Richard III

Mind you, I have always liked the well-known portrait of the last Plantagenet, Richard III, ever since I read Josephine Tey's novel, The Daughter of Time, as a teenager. It is this intelligent, troubled face that inspired Miss Tey's convalescing Inspector Grant to stave off his boredom by launching a private inquiry into the fate of the little Princes in the Tower: did Richard have them murdered? Grant brings his modern Scotland Yard methods to bear on the historical mystery, with surprising results.

Sadly, the truth is that this romantic portrait of King Richard was painted over a century after his death: the age of the oak panel on which it is painted can be accurately dated by dendrochronology. (I read that word in a National Geographic at the dentist's and I've waited a long time for the chance to impress my Gentle Readers with it!)

With the advent of the Tudors, the kings started hitting the Great Painters jackpot. Henry VII was painted by Michael Sittow, one of the foremost Flemish painters of the time; his successor Henry VIII upgraded the Flemish connection from Sittow to Holbein. The first Elizabeth had Nicholas Hilliard. Charles I trumped them all with Anthony van Dyck, but Charles II fought back gamely with Peter Lely, who for good measure painted all his mistresses too. (That would have been a full-time job!)

"The Secret Picture"

European royalty loved Franz Winterhalter's romantic and flattering portraits, and Queen Victoria was no exception. He painted dozens of portraits of the Queen and her circle, including a very special one which she gave to Prince Albert as a birthday gift in 1843. The Prince considered her bare shoulders, loose hair and langourous expression too sensual and intimate for eyes other than his own, and kept it behind a screen in his private office.  Albert was of course entitled to his opinion but for myself, I can't really see anyone being driven crazy with lust by the "secret picture", as the queen referred to it in her diary. It's no Playboy centrefold.

Our own Queen is undoubtedly the most portrayed monarch of them all. During the first 60 years of her reign, she has sat for 139 official portraits. She is a public figure, instantly recognisable, but she is still enigmatic: her thoughts and opinions remain private.

She has been painted by all the prominent painters of our time, from Piero Annigoni to Lucien Freud. Even Rolf Harris has had a go, not to mention Andy Warhol. Her Majesty has also been more photographed than any of her predecessors: Cecil Beaton, Yousuf Karsh, Lichfield, Snowdon, Annie Leibowitz - she has posed for all the great lensmasters.

Piero Annigoni, 1954

To my mind Annigoni's compelling 1954 portrait is the iconic one of the reign. (I always try to forget that is was commissioned by The Fishmonger's Company - even the Glovemakers or the Pastrycooks would have sounded better!) Anyway, despite the whiff of haddock, it is considered to be one of the great royal portraits of the century. The Queen is an aloof figure, isolated in a wintry landscape. She wears the dark blue cloak of the Garter Knights, and needs no jewels to proclaim her majestic status.

Annie Leibovitz, 2007

  Half a century later, Annie Leibowitz reprised that theme, photographing Her Majesty in an admiral's dark blue cloak, against a dramatic sky. Perhaps Leibowitz also used the sky to reference the storm clouds in the famous "Ditchley Portrait" of the first Elizabeth, although for dramatic impact that theatrical cloak beats the farthingale every time!

 

"Lightness of Being" by Chris Levine

My favourite photograph of the Queen is one by Chris Levine, taken during a lengthy photo shoot in 2007, when, resting between shots, she briefly closed her eyes. Levine calls it "Lightness of Being". The image seems poised between the public persona and the private individual, an endearing moment in which we see the elderly lady behind the majestic facade. It is a far cry from the posed formal shots of the Beaton era, but no less dignified despite the humanising realisation that Queens also get tired.

Lucian Freud

Lucian Freud is considered one of the greatest British painters of the century.  His 2001 portrait of the Queen was commissioned for the Royal Collection. It is was not well received: generally reviled as ugly, a travesty and a disgrace. Knowing Freud's uncompromising eye and his unsparing approach to his subjects, I can't help but wonder: what did the people who commissioned it expect? Can it be that they were blinded by the Great Name but hadn't actually seen his work? Another of those Little Mysteries of Life that crop up so regularly in these articles.

I dearly wish that I could talk about and show more of the many remarkable portraits of this remarkable woman, but as always, space does not permit. I can, however, recommend "The Queen: Art and Image", available at your local library.

Artemisia Gentileschi

Artemisia: Self-portrait

 Many of our members will remember the 2004 exhibition Darkness & Light: Caravaggio & his World, which featured key works by Caravaggio and the "Caravaggisti": the artists who copied Caravaggio's chiaroscuro style.

One of the most arresting pictures in the exhibition was the dramatic "Judith Beheading Holofernes" by Artemisa Gentileschi. Judith has been depicted by innumerable artists: Michaelangelo put her on the Sistine ceiling, Donatello cast her in bronze. She appears in stained glass, in frescoes and in engravings. Caravaggio, Botticelli, Rubens and Goya all had a go. Some Judiths are fierce, some are demure. Some wear lavish gowns, some are nude.  Klimt's Judith is all elegant golden beauty, with Holofernes' head just an afterthought in the corner. 

Judith Beheading Holofernes

But none of them comes even close to the savage intensity which Artemisia's Judith brings to the job. Holofernes,stupefied by wine, is at her mercy. She has grasped a handful of his hair and she has turned his head sideways to expose his jugular. While she hacks away, her maidservant holds him down.

The beheading is at the same time a hideous symbolic castration: his arms and shoulders resemble a pair of raised thighs, between which Judith is wielding the blade. The face of Judith is a self-portrait of the vengeful Artemisia, and she has given Holofernes the face of Agostino Tassi, who raped her while his offsider held her down, when she was eighteen years old.
Artemisia was the daughter of Orazio Gentileschi, who was a prominent Roman artist, a contemporary and close friend of Caravaggio. Artemisia was thirteen when Caravaggio fled Rome after killing a man in a street fight.

Despite Artemisia's talent, the art academies would not accept a female, so she received her early training from her father, but continued her studies under the tutelage of Orazio's friend and colleague, the 45-year old Agostino Tassi. Why Orazio would entrust his daughter to this creep, who had already been in trouble for sexual molestation of both young girls and boys, is a mystery. Even as he was engaged as Artemisia's tutor, he was under investigation for incest, in the rape of his late wife's 14-year-old sister. The wife herself was stalked and killed after she left him - case unsolved, but the smart money is on the bereaved husband.

Predictably, Tassi raped Artemisia when her father was not at home, depite her savage  resistance. He must have suspected that she wouldn't be too keen, so he brought a friend to hold her down. Apparently this was not an unusual occurrence in seventeenth-century Rome, and not many eyebrows were raised in such cases as long as the rapist offered to marry his victim. It gives a whole new meaning to not taking no for an answer. There was no turning down a determined suitor!

Tassi duly promised to marry Artemisia, so her father told her to stop whinging and start shopping for a wedding gown, while he continued to work and socialise with Tassi.  When a year later Tassi still showed no signs of marrying Artemisia, who was now expected to submit to his unwelcome attentions on a regular basis, Orazio beatedly decided to play the indignant father and sue the reluctant bridegroom for rape.

Even in modern times, we all know women are unwilling to sue rapists, because they get traumatised all over again by having to relive the experience and being depicted by the defence as a slut who was "asking for it". At least a rape victim in a modern court is only mentally tortured. The Roman court applied thumbscrews while a rape victim gave her evidence, to ensure that she spoke the truth on the witness stand. The accused rapist was assumed to be truthful without the help of thumbscrews. Artemisia also had to undergo a painful and humiliating vaginal examination, although I can't think what that was meant to establish, a year after the event.

The trial lasted seven months, and a transcript of the whole court case survives in the judicial archives in Rome. At the end of it all, Tassi was found guilty and sentenced to a year in prison, but he had friends in high places and was out in four months.

Artemisia painted her "Judith" in 1612, the year following the trial. One would hope the work had a cathartic effect, but perhaps not, because eight years later she painted a larger and bloodier version. The owner, the Duchess Marie-Louise de Medici, hung the painting in her private chambers as she considered it too horrifying for her reception rooms. In 2002, it went on public display for the first time at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence.

Jael driving a tent peg into the head of Sisera

Artemisia painted another notable biblical scene in which a woman wreaks revenge on a male predator: Jael driving a tent peg into the temple of the oppressor Sisera. Once again Jael and Sisera bear a strong resemblance to the artist and Tassi.

The lasting effect of the rape and trial showed in her frequent choice of exploited women as subjects: the rape victim and suicide Lucretia; Cleopatra, defeated and betrayed; Susanna, blackmailed by lecherous and voyeuristic old men.

Susanna and the Elders

Artemisia married a Florentine artist, Pietro Stiattesi, in the same year and moved to Florence, perhaps to escape the sensation caused by the trial. Her career took off in Florence: among her friends and patrons were Duke Cosimo de Medici and the astronomer Galileo. She became an official member of the Academie del Disegno (Academy of Design), an unprecedented honour for a woman.

Her career established, her work was much in demand and commissions flowed in. Nonetheless, she was constantly in financial difficulties, having by now to support two children and a husband who preferred gambling to working.

In 1617 she gave birth to a third child, her first daughter, and became reconciled with her father. Not surprisingly, relations with him had been strained since the horrors of the trial that he had insisted on putting her through. A couple of years later she returned to Rome for a while, but mostly spent her time travelling between Genoa and Rome, and also successfully sought commissions  in Venice. She regained her financial security and the Roman census of 1624 notes her as the head of the household rather than Stiattesi's wife, so she seems to have taken control of her life and kept the loser she married from frittering her earnings away.

There are references from the time describing Artemisia as a "famous Roman artist", "a celebrated woman painter". Artemisia numbered among her wealthy and influential patrons cardinals, merchants and the nobility. Among them were Philip IV of Spain, Charles I of England, and the Duke of Modena.

Artemisia resettled in England, as a court painter to King Charles. Her father joined her in painting the ceiling of the Queen's House at Greenwich, where it is still a tourist attraction today. Orazio died in 1639 and Artemisia went to Naples when the English Civil War started in 1641.
She spent the last years of her life in Naples, continuing to paint until her death at age 59. She died of unknown causes in 1652. Some thirty-four of her paintings are known to have survived, as well as twenty-eight letters in her hand.

She was under-appreciated for centuries, but has now finally taken her rightful place among the great Baroque artists. Her life has inspired several biographies, novels and stage plays, as well as the 1997 film Artemisia, starring Valentina Cervi and Michel Serrault.

Judging a Book by its Cover (2)

In 2009, Kaleidoscope published the shortlist for the Diagram Prize for Oddest Book Title of the Year, which was won by "The 2009-2014 World Outlook for 60-milligram Containers of Fromage Frais" by Philip M. Parker.

The 2012 shortlisted titles are worthy successors - among them we have Memoirs of a Japanese Chicken Sexer in 1935 Hebden Bridge by Takayoshi Andoh (the runner-up) and The Great Singapore Penis Panic and the Future of American Mass Hysteria by Scott Mendelson, which came in at third place.

The other shortlisted titles were Estonian Sock Patterns All Around the World, The Mushroom in Christian Art, Afterhoughts of a Worm Hunter and A Century of Sand Dredging in the Bristol Channel: Volume Two.

… and the winner, ta-raaa! Cooking With Poo, by Saiyuud Diwong, who lives in Bangkok. Despite the natural misgivings of those who may have had unfortunate gastric experiences in Bangkok, I hasten to assure my Gentle Readers that Ms Diwong does not include poo as an ingredient in her recipes. Her childhood nickname is Poo, so giving her book that title seemed like a good idea at the time.

I have been sadly remiss during the last two years in not reporting on the Diagram Prize, but it's never too late:

In  2010 the prize was taken out by Daina Taimina's (no doubt unputdownable) Crocheting Adventures with Hyperbolic Planes. Runner-up was Greek Rural Postmen and Their Cancellation Numbers.

The 2011 winner was Managing a Dental Practice the Genghis Khan Way, by Michael R Young, with Bombproof Your Horse coming in second by a nose.

The award has been running since 1978, when it was conceived at the Frankfurt book fair and given to Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Nude Mice. Previous winners include Highlights in the History of Concrete and Living with Crazy Buttocks, which was penned by our very own Kaz Cooke. Australia is always in the forefront of world literature!

Vintage Dust Jackets

Original dust jackets in mint condition are pulling in the big bucks at international auction houses. Go check the attic for one of these; you can get up to a million dollars if Grandpa was a keen reader who looked after his books!

Or maybe Granny stockpiled the romances in a trunk under the house … you could be on to a good thing if you discover a cache of old Mills and Boons!