Last year, 116,415 new books were published in the UK, of which 10,860 were works of fiction. Even reading at a rate of one novel or collection of short stories per day, it would take you 29 years, 8 months and 24 days to get through them all. By which time a further 322,900 would have appeared, and - many of them - disappeared. And that's not taking into account the year on year increase: 10,860 is a rise of 10.8 per cent on 1999's 9800. If that rate of growth persists, in the same year that you turn the last mouldering page of the last novel at the bottom of your millennial stack (2028, assuming you began in 2000), 191,840 new works of fiction will be published. Such an implausible figure suggests that the current rate of growth is unsustainable, a slump inevitable.

LRB 23 August 2001 | PDF Download