There are 1,440 minutes in a day. Compiling a list with quotes for each and every one of them from different literary works is a massive undertaking. Big relief: others already did that for us.

In 2011, newspaper The Guardian asked its readers to submit quotes from books which mention times. They wanted to build an installation for a literary festival. So they have two versions of a list on their website (1, 2).

I combined the two lists, cleaned them up, added a few times I found myself, and turned them into one CSV file.

Unfortunately the list does not cover all minutes of the day. I worked around this by using some quotes more than once, for instance if it can be used both in the AM and PM. More vague time indications can be used around a certain time, so this quote from Catcher in the Rye is used at 9.58AM: "I didn't sleep too long, because I think it was only around ten o'clock when I woke up ... "

Even with this pleasant list, two things took me an unreasonable amount of time. I needed to turn every single quotation from the list into an image. I wanted to make them fit nicely to the screen, so the font would be as large as possible for each quotation.

While scaling a text box to a certain height and width is easy to do manually in most photo editing software, it would have been an immense amount of work to create them one by one. Creating a script to do it for me however proved to be quite the task as well. In PHP (I used that programming language because it has nice functions to deal with text) I wrote a recursive function to find the best fit for each quotation, long or short. For each line, the script creates two PNG images, one with and one without metadata.

It uses the Libertine font, which I like because of its stylish look, because it is very complete (numbers, punctuation, diacritics) and because it's open source.

The other thing that took me a long time is identifying all time mentions in the quotations, because I wanted to write them in bold text. That makes the clock easier to use, especially when a quote is quite long. The problem is that in books, an impressive variation of time descriptions is used. It can be anything from '6.00 p.m.' or '18:11:00' to '0600h', 'around six o'clock', just 'at six', or 'twenty-eight minutes past eleven'. I made a script to try and find most of these variations, did the ones it couldn't find myself, and added them to the csv file.

If you want to make your own Kindle clock, you may use my scripts (find them attached below), but you can also just download all the resulting images.