AustLit

'The stumps under our floor are teeming and though not the cause it is nevertheless a cause for alarm, the weight o thousands of books we have partially shelved but also stacked in piles of varying consonance impossible to discard. Yet despite this number, it is the handful of books. missing through loans or misfortune, that haunt me. Though not uncommon for me particularly this hinges on an inheritance of familial experience, and I am predisposed to regard that which is missing as a great and gaping hole in which one aught never discern a silver lining, but rather a direct and literal loss, since our lives have been lived as much in the absence of things as in the presence of what has come to replace them.' (Introduction)