Imagine for a moment you are a teacher preparing your student reading list for a university course on Australian realist writers of the 1940s and 1950s. You want a range of books representative of this interesting era when Australia began to transform from and agricultural monoculture to today's sophisticated multiculture. ... You send off your reading list to the bookshop and the text-buyer rings you next day to tell you they are all out of print. You cannot teach your course. The situation facing teachers of Australian literature is this serious. Too many Australian works of value and significance are out of print.