Ack, I'll try not to let it go to my head! Hacking on backends is more then I bargained for! I'm no good at making bitmaps, so someone else should figure out what the button should look like. I'll make my demo into a proper dialog, hook it up to generic button, and I'll even take a whack at the wx backend, but that will be tricky, since it won't even run on my machine for some reason. I suppose you just got a reluctant wx developer, if I'm going to debug that 
If all goes well, I'll see about the ticklabels.
As for your question about axes_demo, I was thinking along these lines while developing the code. It would be simple enough to generalize to working with a list of axes, rather than passing a figure and querying the figure to get the list. A bounding box would have to be passed along also, to stand in for the full figure [0,1],[0,1] box. A default bounding box could be defined by the axes. It should be fairly simple to implement. I just thought it was getting a little too ambitious (or at least more then my needs required, if you prefer!)
For that matter, it doesn't have to work on only axes. Any rectangular region would do. The Text class even has get_position and set_position methods! See the kind of trouble I get into?
Chris Fuller