The Literary Clock

I was reading The Hobbit (for the 100th time) when I came upon this passage: If you ever pass through Bag End, tea is at four. You are welcome anytime. Don’t bother knocking! and that gave me the idea to build a clock that tells the time using passages from books.

Finding the quotes

I started with a large corpus of literary time quotes, then used my own reading log to rank them: quotes from books I have read come first, followed by authors I have read. Ties favour shorter passages.

The full file ended up being too large for the client bundle, so I split it into 24 static JSON files. The page fetches only the current hour and prefetches the next one near the end of the hour, keeping the initial download smaller.

Every minute feels different

The interface is deliberately plain: the time, a quote, and its source. As the minute passes, the text gradually gains emphasis with a mask that washes over the muted quote.

I tried revealing it character by character, but it felt uneven and clunky because quote lengths rarely divide neatly across 60 seconds. So for the final version I measure each rendered line and treat it as a small progress bar. Long and short passages still give each minute a different rhythm, which became my favourite part of the clock.

It is a small thing, built over a couple of evenings, but it connects reading and motion, and it’s the sort of strange little thing I feel personal websites deserve. That to me is reason enough to build it!

See it live: edmundo.is/on-time

Ps.: since building this, one of my friends pointed out that there is already a product out there called Author Clock that does pretty much the same thing. It’s cool, but I’m gonna be honest… I do not care for their typesetting, and at over $200 feels like way too much money for such a simple product, so I’m gonna build my own as a digital frame.