Page One: the consignment book

The parcel office at Sonnborn is two rooms, a counter and four shelves, and for eleven years it moved small consignments along the Schwebebahn, the railway that hangs its carriages under an iron trestle over the middle of Wuppertal, for firms that did not want to pay a carrier. The clerk wrote a shelf number against every consignment in the book, and for ten of those years the numbers ran one to four and meant exactly what they said.

In the eleventh they stopped doing that.

The final page of the consignment book

SHELF  CONSIGNEE
  2    KRAMER
  3    HEIDRICH
  4    SILVESTER
  7    BRAUNFELS
  5    OSTERMANN
  5    HOLZBAUER
  2    NEUMANN
  4    WEIDMANN

There is no shelf five, six or seven in this building and there never has been; you have counted them twice. The number is still doing a job, and it is still pointing at something. It has simply stopped pointing at the room.

Work out what each number is counting, do it to every line, and read down the page.