Over at Q & Q today, a rundown of this cheeky bit of NYT rhetoric, an author's appeal for a wedge of that U.S. bailout cheddar:

Overcapacity has been something generally acknowledged across the writing industry for at least 10 years. In a 2002 essay in The New York Times, the onetime best-selling novelist and story writer Ann Beattie mourned the situation of the modern writer, living in a world where people are more interested in "being a writer" than in writing itself. "There are too many of us, and M.F.A. programs graduate more every year, causing publishers to suffer snow-blindness, which has resulted in everyone getting lost," she lamented. That Ann Beattie must now compete on Amazon with a self-published author named Ann Rothrock Beattie is proof of how enormous the blizzard has become.

So how would my big St. Bernard of a bailout dig the publishers out of their drifts? According to the industry tracker Bowker, about 275,000 new titles and editions are published in the United States each year. Let's say we want to eliminate half of them. Assuming it takes about two years to write your average book, we would offer book writers two years of salary at the writers' average annual income of $38,000 a year. Add it all up and you get a paltry $10.5 billion to dramatically reduce the book overcapacity.

Too many books, people? Quill says yes, and apart from rope and hanging oneself, I think I probably do, too. My sister used to work in a bookstore where employees wore out this acronym: STLR, or Straight-To-Landfill Release.

Think of the trees, one commenter says. Which got me to wondering: exactly how many trees does it take to make a book?

One ton of virgin free-sheet paper is made using the pulp and bark from 24 trees. 1 tree makes 16.67 reams of paper or 8,333 sheets. Say the average novel uses 320 pages or 80 sheets. And is printed at the bestseller threshold of 5,000 copies.

1 book = 48 trees.