The Yatimat al-dahr fi mahasin ahl al-'asr and its sequel Tatimma al-Yatima of Abu Mansur al-Tha'alibi (350-429/961-1039) are perhaps the oldest surviving books in Arabic that deal with literature based on geographical divisions and contemporary literature. In order to understand the history, significance, and the culture in which these texts were born, it is important to examine and compare the sources of each of their regions. Shawkat Toorawa, Walter Werkmeister, Manfred Fleischhammer, Fuat Sezgin, and Sebastian Günther stress the importance of written and aural sources in adab compilations from the third/ninth and fourth/tenth centuries by examining the sources of three major udaba': Ibn Abi Tahir Tayfur (d. 280/893), Ibn 'Abd Rabbihi (d. 328/940), and Abu l-Faraj al-Isbahani (d. 356/967). Al-Tha'alibi’s Yatima and Tatimma present a different case, as they feature a strong return to orality and reliance on different techniques of transmission governing each of their sections. The continuous travel of littérateurs of the 4th/10th century in search for patronage brought about an increase in the use of oral transmission despite the wide geographical regions. This reliance on orality did not, however, mean the complete abandonment of written sources. The examination of al-Tha'alibi’s sources shows that he used a number of available diwans and books, but the recentness of the material, the width of the geographical area, and the competition for fame, brought into play other written material as well, namely ruq?as and epistles which various littérateurs sent to al-Tha'alibi at times, principally to be included in the successful anthology. Interestingly, the employment of the techniques described above is not homogeneous in all of the sections which shows that al-Tha??lib? relied on different types of sources in each section. Finally, this paper shows that a large amount of the Yat?ma and the Tatimma comes from a limited number of guarantors, from Iraq and further east, whom al-Tha'alibi met in Nishapur or the surrounding cities. These guarantors, I argue, form the backbone of an entire network of littérateurs active in the second half of the fourth/tenth century.