With a keen interest in art and poetry, the magazine Australian Letters commissioned a series of artist-poet collaborations, including contributions from Russell Drysdale and David Campbell, Donald Friend and Douglas Stewart, Leonard French and James McAuley, and Sidney Nolan and Randolph Stow. Eighteen of these collaborations formed part of the numbered series published in the journal. Fourteen of these were issued as separately published booklets.

Dutton in his editorial in the final issue of Australian Letters refers to nineteen collaborations. The collaboration between Tony Butt and Charles Blackman in vol.7, no.4 (1967) is not numbered but may be the nineteenth in the series.