WALK THROUGH THE doors of a suburban op shop and you’ll find the residue of household (de)composition that was once catalogued in rhyming newspaper-speak as hatches, matches and despatches. Along half-a-dozen shelves, tucked behind the racks of second-hand clothes and used cutlery, you’ll even find relics of that twentieth-century mass distribution platform we call ‘books’. There’s something a bit meta about them, just like journalism: the first of capitalism’s disruptors, now themselves disrupted. Almost ­insultingly, like journalists, they’re obliged to tell their own tale.

So, here in my local Vinnies, I’ve come to search – not quite at random – for a handful of books to use as the donkey to carry us through the unwinding of ‘that great black art’, as Rudyard Kipling called the daily press.