Who Has Time To Count?

I don't think that I will ever count every entry but I did want to give everyone a sense of the size of the index. I estimated the number of entries in the purex carton that contained the homers at 550. For the most part, I packed about eight of these cartons into every crate. There are 21 crates. If we go with the 550 number that puts the total number of entries somewhere in the neighborhood of...

550 * 8 * 21 = 92400.

My lack of statistical knowledge aside, I would say there could be anywhere between 80000 and 100000 entries in the index. To the best of my knowledge my grand-mom worked on her index over the past three decades. If we go with the 92400 number, this means that she completed roughly 256 entries a year. My original hope was to scan the entire index. I really doubt that is possible. It isn't just a matter of scanning the entries but also I need to crop the scanned image down to a manageable size. It took me more than an hour to scan the 20 images I was working with for yesterday's post. One of my friends suggested that I outsource the scanning to India (for a fun essay on outsourcing check out A.J. Jacobs attempt to outsource his entire life to India in the book, The Guinea Pig Diaries). I think just the cost of shipping the index to India would be prohibitive. For the time being I am going to browse the index for interesting entries to discuss in the blog. One thing I would like to start working on is returning the cartons to their alphabetical organization. Whatever order my grand-mom had placed the cartons in was lost during the move. Part of the issue is space...right now the index is housed in my garage. I am really not sure where I can store 90000 slips of paper in my house. Here is a picture of the index in its current location:



Once the index is back into alphabetical order, I could feasibly use it as it was intended. When that happens I am open for requests--let me know what you want me to look up and scan.