Credits and licences

The tarot deck

All seventy-eight card faces are from the deck drawn by Pamela Colman Smith to A. E. Waite's direction and first published by William Rider & Son, London, in December 1909. These are scans of that first printing, the one collectors call Pam-A and which Wikimedia Commons dates 1910. Nothing has been altered beyond resizing.

Smith died in 1951, so the artwork has been out of copyright in the United Kingdom, the country of publication, since 1 January 2022, and publication before 1931 puts it in the public domain in the United States. A few countries run longer than life plus seventy — Spain and Colombia among them — and it remains in copyright there until the 2030s. No modern deck has been scanned: the 1971 registration held by U.S. Games Systems is limited on its face to new matter, meaning their lithographic reproduction, card backs and box, none of which is used here.

The card meanings quoted throughout are from Waite's The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, London, 1911. Waite died in 1942, so that text has been out of copyright in the United Kingdom since 2013.

Mineralogical plates

One nineteenth- or early-twentieth-century plate for 20 of the 22 birthstones, from the great illustrated mineralogies — Sowerby, Kurr, Mawe and Bauer — and, for the pearl, Edwin Streeter's Pearls and Pearling Life. Chosen as engravings rather than photographs so they sit with the botanical plates. None has been altered beyond resizing, except that two have been cropped: one was scanned as an open book with the binding in shot, and one carries a black band where the scanner bed showed past the edge of the page.

Sowerby died in 1822, Mawe in 1829 and Kurr in 1870, so those plates are out of copyright on any reckoning. Streeter's book was published in 1886 and does not name the artist of its plates. The pearl is out of copyright in the United States, as a work published before 1931, and in the United Kingdom, where a work whose artist is unknown is protected for seventy years from publication. The four from Bauer's Precious Stones are signed E. Ohmann, whose dates are not recorded anywhere we can find. They were published in 1904 and are unambiguously public domain in the United States; in a country that runs copyright from the artist's death we cannot prove the same, and say so rather than assume it. The licence column below gives the position for each plate separately.

Citrine and tanzanite have no plate. Each stone's page says why.

Star charts

One card for each sign, from Urania's Mirror — a boxed set of thirty-two hand-coloured constellation cards first published in London at the end of 1824 (the set scanned here is dated 1825) and engraved by Sidney Hall. The originals were pricked with holes at the stars so that a card held up to a candle showed the constellation in light. Each has been cropped to the figure, because the cards are wider than they are tall and the answer cards are not.

Zoological plates

One plate for each animal of the Chinese zodiac, nearly all of them from the Iconographia Zoologica, the album of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century animal prints held by the University of Amsterdam, and several of those from Buffon's Histoire naturelle. Each has been cropped to the animal.

The dragon is the exception, and it could not be anything else: it is the one animal of the twelve that no naturalist ever drew from life, so there is no zoological plate of it to find. It is a Japanese colour woodblock print instead, made around 1831 by Utagawa Kuniyoshi.

The planets

The seven days of the week are named for the seven planets of the old sky, and each day's card carries a plate of its planet from the Bilder-Atlas der Sternenwelt, Edmund Weiss's popular astronomy of 1888, printed in chromolithography. In English four of the seven names come by way of the Germanic gods matched to those planets — Tuesday is Tiw's day before it is Mars's — and each day's own page says so. Mercury had no plate of its own in 1888, because nothing could be seen on it; Wednesday's card shows the atlas's diagram of the planets to scale, in which Mercury is one small disc among the rest.

Five emblems

Three of the answer cards have nothing to draw: an age is a duration, a generation is a label somebody chose, and a life path is a number. Each carries one picture that is the same whatever the answer, and the label under it is what says which card it is.

Two more stand in until a year is put in, because the Chinese animal and the weekday are not known before then: a painting of the zodiac animals together, and the old sky of the seven bodies the days are named for. Once there is a year each card shows its own animal or planet instead.

Botanical plates

One engraving for each month's flower, all of them published long enough ago to have fallen out of copyright everywhere. None has been altered beyond resizing.

Typefaces

Both are served from this site rather than from anyone else's, so reading a page here makes no request to a third party.

Data

• Notable births and deaths: the years and the short description of each person come from Wikidata, which publishes under CC0. Wikidata's descriptions are free text that anyone can edit, so each is checked and corrected by hand where needed. No photographs, and nothing inferred about anybody. No living person is described here by an offence. A removal can be asked for on the contact page.
• Which people belong to a date, and the name each is shown under, are taken from the English Wikipedia's day pages: the name is the title of the person's article, less any bracketed words that tell two articles apart, unless it had to be corrected by hand. Nothing else from them is used and none of their text is reproduced. Wikipedia's content is licensed CC BY-SA 4.0, and that covers the editors' choice of who belongs on a date as well as the prose, so it is named here.
• The moments the sun enters each sign, for 1900 to 2100, were computed once from VSOP87, the theory of the planets' motion published by the Bureau des Longitudes in Paris, and are kept as a table. The Chinese calendar's new moons and solstices are computed on this site with the formulae in Jean Meeus's Astronomical Algorithms. The about page says more. What they produce are facts about the sky, not anybody's text or pictures, and carry no licence. The moon's phases on a birth date come from the same book's formulae.
• The average number of births on each date of the year in England and Wales, 1995 to 2014, shown on every date page, is the Office for National Statistics' own, published with its article How popular is your birthday? (2015). Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. The ranks are worked out on this site from the ONS averages.