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Adrian King Edwards is the proprietor of The Word Bookstore near McGill University in Montreal; has been for more than 40 years.

All historians must be concerned with their sources. In many instances these are easily accessible, far more so today than in the past, in the relative convenience of professionally run university libraries, historical societies or museums. Since World War II academic institutions in the United States have enjoyed an extraordinary growth in their collections of the raw materials of American history, coupled with technological advances which have made it vastly easier to catalogue, locate and reach the original documents within the protective web of institutional control. It has never been easier to reach the books and manuscripts that are the bases of historical research.

If you want to collect John Updike in detail, you'd better build an addition onto your library. Its not true that he publishes a new book every week, it just seems like it, and his cheery indifference to writers' block has probably made him an editor's dream. He is generous with his signature, and apparently open to offers from publishers of limited editions.

As there were nine muses in Ancient Greece, Sally O'Reilly portrays nine examples of notable literary muses throughout history for the Huffington Post: Dante fell in love with Beatrice Portinari; Aemilia Lanyer was Shakespeare's "Dark Lady"; His unrequited love for Fanny Brawne drove John Keats to write some of his best poems; Charles Dickens was inspired by Nelly Ternan, Charles Baudelaire took his inspiration from Jeanne Duval; Zelda Sayre became F. Scott Fitzgerald's wife and muse; Vivienne and T.S. Eliot's marriage was stormy and unhappy; the troubles in Yeats' life began when he met Maude Gonne; and Jack Kerouac's muse was one of the icons of the Beat Generation: Neal Cassady.

I have already spent two and a half weeks in Australia. First 10 days I spent in Sidney with Paul Feain. Paul is the owner of Cornstalk Bookshop and Sidney Rare Book Auctions. It is a great chance for me to work with him, because I work in an auction house in Moscow and it is really interesting to get new information about the auction business. Now, after 35 years, Paul is selling his real estate and going to close the shop in April, but he is pushing ahead with the auctions. The next auction was on Saturday, February 22nd and I participated in the preparation of this auction. I made some book descriptions for the auction catalogue, but principally, I worked with Paul's reference library. This library is great! I really enjoyed working with it.

Melbourne Rare Book Week was, and is, a stroke of marketing genius! It has transformed how ANZAAB members feel about our book fairs, made our Melbourne Book Fair a very successful event and heightened ANZAAB's profile enormously - but it was not something we all "got" at the beginning …