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One thing is certain: the appetite for print is growing. In 1996, there were between 60,000 and 100,000 new titles in the UK each year. By 2007, it was pushing 200,000. That's the biggest annual output of any country in the Western world, turning over some £4bn a year.

All this has been fuelled by an explosive mixture of global commerce and technology. In simple terms, you could say that Amazon plus Microsoft equals a new literary stratosphere. Two things complicate this equation. First, despite the steady evolution from typesetting to digitisation, the printed book has held out against electronic options. It is as if, after lift-off, the Apollo mission turned out to be not a space capsule but a Spitfire.

In our new consumer-oriented model of higher
education, schools compete for students, but so do departments within
schools. The bleaker it looks for English departments, the more
desperate they become to attract attention.

In other words, the profession's intellectual agenda is being set by
teenagers

Many if not most serious fiction writers still think of digital media as a threat rather than an opportunity. The online world, especially for the older crowd, is still conventionally depicted as a kind of South Bank of London filled with the literary equivalent of bear-baiting.

The technology boosters think of themselves as saviors of a hopelessly backward humanity, while grim-jawed Luddites are bracing themselves for an apocalyptic cultural collapse involving “the death of literature” rather than simply the death of print’s dominance. Both camps in the Print Wars rely on a similar and false sense of crisis. Human beings crave and adore absorption in narrative.

together with a slew of fantastic tales, such as his first wife dying
from a parrot bite, his surviving a torpedo attack on board a submarine,
making and losing $1m from dealing in crop shares and supplying cocaine to
Cole Porter, was nothing more than the product of an overactive imagination.
In fact, he was born Harold Rubin and grew up in Brooklyn, where his father
ran a drugstore. The woman he said was his first wife, Muriel Ling, did not
exist. He never served in the US forces, had no involvement in crop dealing
and did not sell drugs.

After his death – on October 14, 1997, age 81 – every single newspaper
obituary printed the elaborate alternative reality Robbins had created. In
the course of his life, the ultimate storyteller had succeeded in creating
his best fiction: himself.

The Ab-Exers were great formal innovators, but even more important than Pollock's drips or de Kooning's arabesques was their revolutionary insight that a painting can represent nothing other than the process of its own creation.

Now, more than half a century later, we're still reeling from this revelation. Hence the continuing fascination with cases like Marla's. For those who believe that painting must be about something more than just color and gesture—like craft or technical skill or mimetic representation—abstract paintings by children and animals provide the ultimate refutation, proof that modern art is indeed a hoax. But such skeptics profoundly miss the point of the art they're trying to debunk. Yes, anyone can pick up a brush and slather paint on canvas in a drippy style that evokes Jackson Pollock. But it took an artist like Pollock to step back from his own work, which at the time looked unlike anything that had come before, and say, with bold conviction: "This is it. This is what modern painting looks like." In other words, Pollock taught us how to see art in a new way.