About the book

Colophon

Quotationary is a reading room, not a dump of posters. It holds 205 lines, 161 voices, and 153 days tied to something that can be dated. The rest of the year is filled honestly from the shelf.

How a day is chosen

If a line was spoken, published, born into, or ended on a calendar date, that date leads with it. When several lines belong to the same day, they are ordered by what happened: spoken, then a remembered event, then a publication, then a death, then a birth, then a day the editors simply keep. Within a rank, the line’s name breaks the tie. The year’s number picks a place in that order, and holds it for the whole year. Next year, the book steps to the next place. Nothing is randomized, and nothing is quietly preferred.

A few days are marked kept. February 14 is the birthday Frederick Douglass chose, because the real day had been withheld. January 1 carries Franklin’s resolution because the year wants an opening. December 25 carries the angels in Luke, with the note that the feast is not a documented birthday. Kept means labeled. It does not mean invented history.

Days with no tether say “From the shelf.” The line is chosen from the whole canon by the year and the day’s place in a 366-day book, so March 1 does not shift when February has no 29th. February 29 has a page anyway.

How an attribution is held

Primary means a text we can point at. Traditional means a wording that has come down through reporters, interpreters, or a later biographer, and is flagged in the margin. Disputed means the sentence is famous and the evidence is not good enough to pretend. The corrections shelf is for lines that should not be in the canon at all: Gandhi’s bumper sticker, Einstein’s insanity, Churchill without the toil, Voltaire’s defender, the pail and the fire.

Translations prefer a public-domain hand when one is honest: Nicholson for Rumi, not a modern paraphrase; the King James where the English is the English people actually quote; Pickthall for the Qur’an. Short extracts only, where a work is still in copyright. Living translators are not raided for a prettier sentence.

The commonplace book

Keep, and the trail of lines you open, stay in this browser under two local keys. There is no account and no server copy. Clearing the browser clears the book.

Reading

Arrow keys turn the day. S keeps or releases the open line. Slash focuses the search. Light and dark follow the system until you choose, and then they stay chosen.

The room

Type is Fraunces and Outfit. The paper is warm, the dark is ink, the accent is sealing wax. The interface is meant to get out of the way of one sentence, the way a good reference page does.