From the desk
House rules for the registers
Every register on this site follows the same apparatus. Rather than explain it nine times, the desk explains it here and the registers link back. Nothing on this page is a finding.
On the absence of posters
Where a poster ought to sit, the register prints a plate: a ruled box carrying the title, the year, the hand responsible, and a line saying no cut is on file.
This is not an oversight and it is not modesty. The posters belong to their studios and publishers, this paper's own security policy declines to load pictures from anybody else's premises, and a broadsheet of the vintage we are impersonating could not have printed one anyway. It would have commissioned an engraving, failed to get it back before deadline, and run a box saying so. We have skipped to the box.
The plates do at least say what they stand in for. A film is struck on sprocketed stock at the proportions it was released in; television arrives on a squarer plate ruled with scan lines; a book is bound, with a tooled spine and its page edges showing; a weekly part is stitched at the fold; a comic is stitched and ruled into panels; and an official document is hatched like the form it is. The shapes differ, the printed area does not, so a run of plates reads as one set rather than a shelf of mismatched boxes.
Two clocks
Every register can be read in two orders and keeps both, because they answer different questions. The period clock sorts by when the events claim to have happened, and it is the default, because a chronology of a subject is not a chronology of its publishing. The release order sorts by when somebody got round to printing it, which is the right order for watching a rule get invented.
Plate numbers are struck in release order and never change, which is why they run out of sequence on the period clock. The year range filter works on release dates in both arrangements, because "filed between" is a question about the paperwork and stays one.
The filters
A long spine is more than anyone can scroll by nudging, so above it there are filters and a row of era jumps. Bands with nothing in them after filtering remove themselves, and a register only offers a medium chip it can actually fill.
Show only the books, only the films, only what was broadcast. Drop every adaptation and remake to see what the record looks like with nothing but first filings in it. Close the year range on a decade and read just that. The desk built all of this for itself and then could not think of a reason to keep it.
What a card is, and is not
One work to a card. No packet cards bundling several works behind one entry, and an adaptation or remake gets its own plate rather than being folded into its source. Declining a work is allowed and is stated out loud; bundling is not allowed at all.
Years, authors and directors are cited fact. Stamps, jurisdictions and dispositions are the desk's own filing apparatus and have no standing anywhere. Where a card carries a real document about real people, it cites the document and the disposition and stops: no name of a person a prosecution was run against, no address, no photograph, and no inference about what anybody wanted, believed or intended.
