In praise of the tally sheet

The most valuable object in this building is a pad of ruled paper.

Before anything is filmed or scanned it is counted, and the count is written down and initialled by the person who did it. Rosalind Teague, who ran the verification bench here for twenty years, wrote in the newsletter that labour is the cheapest part of trust. I have that on a card above my desk.

Her column is worth reading in full. The Winter 1998 one in particular — she set it one sentence to a line, which the compositor must have hated.