This July Thames & Hudson celebrates 60 years of proud independent publishing. Coincidently, it is their 40-year anniversary in Australia!

To celebrate, Thames has chosen 20 of its most influential titles from across the years and has published them as special limited edition collector’s items. These are limited to 1000 sets worldwide.

And for July only, the top 40 bestsellers from the iconic World of Art Series will be reduced to just $12.95! For almost 50 years, these high quality red-and-black books have been the essential reference for visual arts and cultural history.

I’m looking forward to Salvador Dali: Liquid Desire, at the NGV. I had a friend in High School who was a huge fan, and who took me to films of Dali & Gala (Dali’s great love & muse) leaping out of giant eggs on the Catalan coast and caused me to read his hugely entertaining books (e.g. Diary of a Genius which is out of print but check your library). I preferred the paintings of Magritte & De Chirico, but I loved reading about Dali’s life and milieu.

Flicking through the April Issue of Frieze Magazine, I found this quote by US artist Carol Bove (in Frieze Magazine’s ongoing series ‘Ideal syllabus’ in which an artist, curator or writer lists the books that have influenced them) for one of her most influential books - Surrealism: The Road to the Absolute by Anna Balakian,

“I have the growing urge to consider the persistent and largely unacknowledged influence of surrealism since the 1920s and I find it in all sorts of unlikely places. It is the shadow of modernism.”

I found myself agreeing with her. Books like Vitamin D, The Upset, and Limited Edition are full of artists with a surrealist ancestry, and Leonora Carrington’s works sprang to mind looking at Mark Ryden’s work, and others of his ilk.

Just arrived are some long awaited titles from Phaidon Press. Especially two new titles in Phaidon’s Contemporary Artists series: Chinese artists Ai Weiwei & Zhang Huan. Underlying the current babble of the news media, on topics of car salesmen and the lives and demise of pop culture personalities, were the haunting words of eyewitnesses to the Tiananmen Square Massacre (20 years ago, 5/6/09). What is china to us, today? A massively complex & fascinating culture - words that easily fit with these two artists, as well as quite brilliant and awe inspiring.

Pretty Little Liars By Sara Shepard. While it's not your most literary young adult read, it is great fun and hard to put down. Bit like Gossip Girl, but set in Pennsylvania with a killer, stalker and your average mean girls, Pretty Little Liars is nothing short of a bit of wonderful fluff that every teen (and adult!) needs at times in their life.

The winners of the 2009 Carnegie Medal (for an outstanding book for children) and the Kate Greenaway Medal (for distinguished illustration in a book for children) have been announced.

The winner of the Carnegie Medal is Bog Child by Siobhan Dowd (left). Watch the video of the announcement and the acceptance speech here.

The winner of the Kate Greenaway Medal is Harris Finds His Feet by Catherine Rayner (left). Watch the video of the announcement and Catherine Rayner's acceptance speech here.

To commemorate Readings' 40th birthday this year we are very happy to announce that a special Readings anthology called Readings and Writings: 40 Years in Books has been put together and will be published this August.

Edited by Jason Cotter and Michael Williams, with an introduction from Shane Maloney, the anthology will feature all new stories from Alex Miller, Peter Goldsworthy, Cate Kennedy, Christos Tsiolkas, Mark Seymour, Paddy O’Reilly, Chris Womersley, Kate Holden, Elliot Perlman, Myfanwy Jones, Tony Birch, Steven Amsterdam and more.

All proceeds from the sale of this book will go to newly created The Readings Foundation which supports Victorian individuals and organisations that wish to further the development of Literacy, Community work and the Arts.

The Next 50 Popular Penguins have arrived at Readings.

To celebrate we are offering a free Penguin book light whenever you buy five or more of the new Popular Penguins.

Here's a demonstration of the nifty Penguin book light. Buy quickly - either online or in one of the six Readings shops - as stocks of the book lights are limited.

“Is not advisable, nor was it ever advisable, to lead a Dada life. It is and it always was foolish and self destructive to lead a Dada life because a Dada life will include by definition pranks, buffoonery, masking, deranged senses, intoxication, sabotage, taboo breaking, playing childish and/or dangerous games, waking up dead gods, and not taking education seriously."

So writes Andrei Codrescu, who has written the definitive Posthuman Dada Guide, a far more useful circum-navigational tool than the Luxe City Guides if you ask me. Dada would chew the ear off Monsieur Luxe and use his children to feed rabbits in the train station kiosk.

Such a life, lived even without the handy advice of Dr. Codrescu, has nevertheless been chosen, it seems, by a little old woman with a big smile called Mirka Mora. A women who threatens the legal system with poetry, and is known to sometimes, perhaps not often enough, appear almost naked in public.

I was a young boy when I first saw her. It was evening and my father was breaking into a large case of wine, without a bottle opener. (These were the years before screw tops, a thought we would have gasped at then.) There was an old goods-lift, which took us up one floor to the art gallery above, which was already full of people. If felt hot and dangerous up there, airless and drunken. Suddenly a women, she must have been sixty five at least, climbed onto the table and began speaking loudly above the crowd, languidly pealing off her clothes till she stood, amply and slightly aglow, in her lingerie. If I was writing a coming of age story about surfing, I’d say that this was my first erotic encounter.

Fully clothed, Mirka Mora dropped by this week to inspect her Mural with Sabine Cotte, above, who will be restoring the image on Mirka’s behalf. The wall was damaged when a person with very sharp ears ran past at about 100km an hour, a futurist I believe, enamored by destruction. This is an artist's impression of the culptrit.

That art gallery where my erotic education began is closed now. The bookstore below is a Pharmcy , where the light has that mysterious quality that always makes one feel as if they are about to be experimented on. Sometimes I look behind the mouthwash shelves, for a book which might have fallen down, years ago, or a left over bottle of wine. Sometimes it is good to wake up the dead Gods.