When I recently read William Bird's superb book Paint By Number: The How-to Craze that Swept the Nation, I learned how controversial the hobby was. Introduced in 1951, the fad instantly exploded, and one company alone sold 12 million kits in three years. Indeed, the trend grew so rapidly partly because of America's increasing post-war leisure: The country was so wildly productive that salarymen suddenly had more free time than ever before, and the deportment of spare time became one of the burning questions of the day. But pretty soon, the pseuds were decrying paint-by-numbers as yet more evidence of the decline of American civilization. All those obedient grey-suited hordes, numbly filling in the blanks, working by rote instead of being creative! Writers sent incensed letters into art magazines bemoaning the "morons" who bought paint-by-number kits. Within a few years, paint by numbers had declined into joke status, "by...


