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ALL that talk last year about how expensive books are in Australia appears to have had an impact on our book buying, but it is not what you might have expected. While book sales in the US and Britain decreased in 2009, here, there was a 5.8 per cent increase. Go figure. Fiction sales, according to an International Market Overview released this month by Nielsen Bookscan, increased by 9.2 per cent in Australia, and children's books a whopping 14 per cent. Indian summer?
IT would take years of psychotherapy to uncover why Old Tom makes me laugh so much. Better, perhaps, just to allow room in my subconscious for this grotesquely endearing creation...