Kate, a perfectionist, has published Silence: A Literary History. A friend read the book and found just one typo, on p. 162.

Then last week another friend (Andrew Dancer) read the book and also found just one typo. It was the same item, on p. 162.

According to principles of Bayesian statistics going by names like the capture-recpature method and the Lincoln-Petersen estimator, this is enough information for us to estimate the total number of typos in Kate’s 451 pages with pretty good accuracy. The estimate is 1.

[27 May 2026]