I've got a bit of a book problem. It's very much like the kind of problem some people have with food: the kind of problem my father used to refer to when he told me that my eyes were too big for my belly. In the same way that I used to imagine I would be able to eat much more than I actually could, I also wrongly imagine I will be able to read many more books than I actually can. In the case of food what happens when your eyes are too big for…
Popular Newcastle bookseller David McLean came to Australia from the US with his parents in 1963, fleeing the shadows cast by the Cuban missile crisis. Here are some of David's recollections: David McLean was in his second-last year of high school in Lincoln, Nebraska, when then US President John F. Kennedy appeared on television to warn the nation that the USSR was placing nuclear missiles on Cuba and that the USA had no option but to take firm action. The news filled millions of Americans with dread, and David's parents - his father had been a…
A few years ago Sylvia and I were giving a talk to a group, about old photos of course, and there was a lot of discussion about how lucky we and others had been at times to benefit from chance discoveries of caches of old negatives. Then Sylvia wondered aloud about photos from the digital era, and how future enthusiasts would manage to stumble on forgotten troves of images that had no physical analogue to help them survive. Having suffered the agony of a hard-drive failure, and the misery of a lightning strike that knocked out…