Back Cover

Cy Dequest was writing Full Stop, a natural history of punctuation. It had eleven chapters, two of which disagreed, and an editor waiting for chapter twelve.

Instead of finishing it, they built a tool to check what a book had promised against what its chapters said. The tool had no opinions about sentences. It kept a list of claims and said so when a chapter disagreed. When they ran it on the book they wrote instead, it flagged Full Stop’s chapter count as an error.

This is an account of the months of evenings that went to the tool, an over-eager assistant who invented a seventeenth-century compositor, and the software built to avoid a book, which finished this one instead.

Cy Dequest writes documentation for a software company, keeps their index cards in shoeboxes, and knows where all of them are but the one that fell behind the radiator.