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As the collator of all this material, Solomon makes his own emotional and intellectual growth one of the book’s themes, as he describes how his subjects helped him shed the blinders he once wore.

If the collator put the query directly into the piece, or if the editor tried to make a fix without being sure what the author meant, there was a danger of corrupting the text.

“There’s been some shift,” says Molly Malloy, the collator and curator of the most extensive archive of these events in Juárez, and the librarian at New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, just across the border.

Eventually, I became what was known as a collator—a Bartleby-like occupation that computers have since done away with.

"The overall headline number has risen but there are signs that it is going to start deteriorating again. Most worrying is the decline in new orders," said Chris Williamson, chief economist at data collator Markit.