Can a compiler have a style? Can his work bear a distinct, personal stamp? This paper approaches the issue of “style” in one of the earliest Ottoman chroniclers, Neshri (d. ca. 1520), author of the Kitab-i Cihannüma, or Cosmorama. We know little about Neshri himself. He is often depicted as a skilled compiler rather than a true historian, curating and harmonizing earlier sources with little mark of his own. As Victor Ménage says, “in general he [was] content—as indeed is to be expected of the author of a vast world-history—to reproduce his sources with little modification” (Neshri's History of the Ottomans: the Sources and Development of the Text, 13-14). But even simple compilers leave something of themselves as they choose, omit, shape, and texture material. The result can arguably tell us not only about the individual but also his temperament, assumptions, and even wider social world. Style in Ottoman history writing is little-studied. What work exists on the topic most often examines authors' use of rhetoric: tropes, imagery, figures, or other literary devices. This paper seeks to explore style beyond just the aesthetic, however, and to locate in text and form deeper traces of human and social meaning. In a classic article from 1965, Paul Wittek described how a ghazi legend in the work of Ashikpashazade, the capture of Aydos castle, was transformed in Neshri's hands through small, nearly imperceptible changes to the text (“The Taking of Aydos Castle: a Ghazi Legend and its Transformation”). I here extend Wittek's close reading to other parts of Neshri beside his main source, Ashikpashazade. There is a “certain logic” to a compiler's choices, as Cemal Kafadar has said (Between Two Worlds: the Construction of the Ottoman State, 107). The result of these choices—changes, word selection, addition, omission, magnification, and patterning—can in fact suggest a good deal beyond just the literary. Despite a close similarity in accounts, Neshri's changes shed light among other things on his background and social milieu, his categories of thought and view of the empire, and also his personality—in other words, on his style. The paper thus offers further ways in which attention to literary style can thicken our appreciation of historical texts and their authors.