A mug sits on the desk with Marilyn Monroe’s face under the sentence Laurel Thatcher Ulrich wrote: “Well-behaved women seldom make history.” The object is wrong at the name and prone to wording drift, and it keeps selling because the right sentiment can carry any name. The claim riding beside it has manners: why care whether the mug gives Monroe a line written by Ulrich, or whether a poster hands Voltaire a sentence built by Evelyn Beatrice Hall, so long as the line still stirs? Its appeal points to use over receipt. Its conclusion says the words have done good work in the world, and good work should settle the bill.

Continue reading → The Quotation’s Chain of Custody