Robert McCrum, literary editor of the UK Sunday paper The Observer, stepped down this month after a decade on the job. Yesterday he deployed a parting shot both wistful and sober-minded. "When I joined The Observer in 1996, the world of books was in limbo between hot metal and cool word processing, " he writes, with a nostalgia that comes off not a little anachronistic, considering we're talking about 1996 here and not 1958. "Everything smelled of the lamp. It was a world of ink and paper; of cigarettes, coffee and strong drink. Our distinguished critic George Steiner used to submit his copy in annotated typescript."

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