In 1881 the astronomer Simon Newcomb noticed that the book of logarithm tables in his library was dirtier at the front. The pages for numbers beginning with 1 had been thumbed grey; the pages for 9 were nearly clean. He worked out why, and fifty-seven years later Frank Benford found it all over again: in a great many real collections of numbers, town populations, the lengths of rivers, the amounts on invoices, about three in ten begin with a 1 and fewer than one in twenty with a 9. People who invent figures don’t know this. They spread their first digits out evenly, because that is what fairness seems to look like, and the evenness is one of the things auditors look for. An honest ledger is lopsided. It’s the made-up one that looks fair.