Kristin Roskifte’s Everybody Counts

Kristin Roskifte’s Everybody Counts: A Counting Story from 0 to 7.5 Billion (Wide Eyed Editions, February 2020), a Norwegian import originally published in 2018, is an unusual counting book. Starting with zero (“no one”), pictured below, readers count up to 7.5 billion — with, needless to say, a few numbers skipped along the way. Readers do count 0 to 30 but then jump from there to 45, and from there things increment more arbitrarily. (And if you’re curious about the big number in the title, readers go from 1,000 to the titular 7,500,000,000, the latter number accompanied by an image of the Earth in space: “Seven and a half billion people on the same planet.”)
This book’s primary delight, though, lies not in the counting of humans, but in the stories hinted at and mysteries that lie within — and Roskifte’s reminder that all those stories count.