ABSTRACT
Starting points for books can often be accidental. It was several years ago now when the starting point for this book was found, somewhat unpropitiously, one dark and slightly misty autumnal morning as I was making my trolley-pushing way towards the check-in of a local regional airport. My eye was caught by a single line of red and blue letters spread out across a large glass-fronted placard. They were arrayed in a straight line against a plain white background. The letters were the letters of the alphabet. Momentarily intrigued by the sight of the alphabet occurring in this form and in this context, I looked more closely, not at first noticing that one of the letters was missing and that its absence was accentuated by a gap between the letter p and the letter r, more or less as follows:
abcdefghijklmnop rstuvwxyz
Closer inspection revealed, of course, that the placard was an advertisement for an airline which counted among the proclaimed benefits of travelling business class the fact that there were no ‘queues’ at its check-in desk and that check-in for passengers with hand luggage only could be undertaken automatically by a machine.
