After four months, Pilling is about halfway through the text, transcribing by hand in pencil into suitably Beckettian battered ancient ledgers, which belonged to his grandfather and proclaim on the cover that George V is king.
Experimental rock will again teem with men who look like socially awkward librarians, soundmen will leaf through ancient ledgers to learn the best way of micing up a vibraphone, and anyone caught playing in a straightforward time-signature will have their tickets to see King Crimson's six-drummer line-up immediately.
In 2016, Israeli archaeologists discovered an ancient wine ledger that contained what they believe to be the earliest written reference to Jerusalem outside the Bible.
They move with practiced deftness through the thousands of ancient index cards, yellowing ledger books and rolled-up oilcloth cemetery maps entrusted to their care.
Hong points out ornate Chinese clan houses, an abandoned photographer's studio with 1960s black and white prints in the window and a Madras textile shop, where the aged assistants still wear dhotis, scribble sales into a dusty, giant ledger, and an ancient poster on the wall proclaims that their checked sarongs were once Made in British India.
And the Iowa collection is first rate, with paintings by Braque, De Chirico, Kandinsky, Léger, Matisse, Picasso and Vlaminck; collections of African art; American studio ceramics; ancient Etruscan and Roman art; Native American ledger drawings; and more than 5,000 items documenting the history of Western print-making.
His halcyon days as a student, when he spent a languid year at the University of Naples and studied ancient Greek for fun as a law student, were far removed from the ledger books and intricacies of trucking routes.
In the play, an old man celebrates his 69th birthday by sorting through boxes full of ancient tape recordings, trying to reconcile his memories of events with actual notes that he has scribbled on an old ledger.
In ancient times, some of the money actually resembled today's cryptocurrency in the sense that it was all based on accounts, a ledger.
