>except now, in my confirmation work, i found at least _ten_
instances where jim might well have missed an italics word.
(can't say for sure, because i don't know exactly what edition
he used, but at least according to my edition, he missed 'em.)

This is quite possibly a true statement (but BB ought to actually compare to the editions that I used which is different than his edition).  I also hate italics work, and I do not know a way to help automate the checking – other than making sure that one records any italic determination made by the original OCR software – which also tend to be very bad at catching italics. Multiple historical printed editions also tend to be very bad at italics, with later editions tending to lose more and more of the italics found in the original.