Status Updates From A Reader's Book of Days: Tr...

August 21

1888 William Seward Burroughs, founder of what became the Burroughs Corporation and grandfather of William S. Burroughs, received four patents for his adding machines.

August 20

1950 Immanuel Velikovsky asks the reader at the opening of Worlds in Collision "to consider for himself whether he is reading a book of fiction or nonfiction"; the New York Times, at least for the purposes of its best-seller list, where Words in Collision spent the last of its eleven weeks at #1 on this day, chose nonfiction. A scientific scandal even before it was published, Velikovsky's book ...

August 19

1890 "I was never fond of towns, houses, society or (it seems) civilization," Robert Louis Stevenson wrote to Henry James, predicting he'd only return to Britain once, to die (he never made it back at all), "I simply prefer Somoa."

August 18

1563 Though as a teenager he wrote a political essay against tyranny, "On Voluntary Slavery," that is still read to this day, Étienne de la Boétie is largely remembered for one reason: as the bosom friend of Michel de Montaigne, who, having spent the previous ten days at La Boétie's side despite the threat of contagion, recorded his death from plague at 3 a.m. on this day...

August 17

1854 Bigamy! Insanity! False identities! Arson! The thrillingly convoluted plot of Lady Audley's Secret, Mary Elizabeth Braddon's triple-decker novel of Victorian sensation and anxiety, made it one of the most popular novels of the age. Writing soon after the Constance Kent murder case captured English headlines with a similar story of family hatreds and high-profile detective work, Braddon constructed...

August 16

1884 Hugo Gernsback, who was born in Luxembourg on this day, cultivated early interests in electronics, Mars, and the United States, and immigrated to the latter in 1903, where, a fan of Mark Twain, he called himself "Huck" and quickly became a radio entrepreneur. Building a fleet of electronics magazines, he published fiction along with the science, including his own novel Ralph 124C41+...

August 15

1788 In the Almanach des honnêts gens, a radical new calendar in which the French poet and revolutionary Sylvain Maréchal replaced the saints' name honoured in the Christian calendar with the names of philosophers, poets, scientists, and even a courtesan, he left one day blank for future generations to fill: August 15, the date of his own birth.

August 14

1881 According to the memoir of his wife, the naturalist Ernest Thompson Seton hated two men: the late General George Armstrong Custer, for the usual reasons, and his own father, who, following Ernest's twenty-first birthday, brought out his massive cash book and computed the amount, beginning with the doctor's fee for his birth, he had seen on his son through his life: $537.50...

August 13

1841 Skeptical and solitary, Nathaniel Hawthorne was always an unlikely candidate for utopia, and within months of joining the Transcendentalist experiment in communal living at Brook Farm he was lamenting that the work left him even less energy for writing than before. "Even my Custom-House experience was not such a thraldom and weariness," he wrote his fiancée on this day...

August 12

1803 With Napoleon's armies massing on the other side of the English Channel, Britain hastily deployed troops in the towns along the coast, including Felpham, the tiny Sussex village where William Blake had moved a few years before, and where he had an altercation with a Private Schofield that nearly cost him his freedom. The soldier claimed Blake had shouted words of sedition, "Damn the King...

August 11

NO YEAR Ever since the strange wreck of a ship nearby, with no apparent survivors save an immense dog that bounded out of sight, the beautiful Lucy Westenra has had restless nights, and in the early, dark hours of August 11 her dear friend Mina wakes to discover Lucy's bed empty and Lucy nowhere to be found. Searching for her out on the cliffs, Mina sees in the ruined abbey across the harbour...

August 10

1914 In early August, as the European powers gathered themselves for battle, two speedy German ships of war, The Goober and the Breslau, were pursued east across the Mediterranean by a fleet of British cruisers that exchanged fire with the Germans but couldn't prevent their escape to the waters of their new Turkish ally.

August 9

1833 From the seaside, George Eliot wrote that the "sacraments" of swimming and beer-drinking have been "very efficacious."

August 8

1920 Katherine Mansfield, in the Athenaeum, on E. M. Forester's "Story of a Siren": "So aware is he of his sensitiveness, of his sense of humour, that they are become two spectators who follow him where ever he goes, and are for ever on the look-out for a display of feeling."

August 7

1836 The "opening salvo" of New England Transcendentalism came in the form of a book of conversations with children. In 1835, Elizabeth Peabody, a teacher at the Temple School of Bronson Alcott (whose students did not yet include his daughter Louisa May), published Record of a School, composed from open-ended dialogues of Alcott and his students. But by the time her book, and thereby his school,...

August 6

1666 Recently widowed but still well connected at the court of Charles II, Aphra Behn entered the king's service as a spy. Sent to Antwerp to report on English exiles plotting against Charles after the Restoration (and to turn one of them, William Scott, an old friend, back to loyalty), she mad her first report on this day, on the initial meeting between "Celadon" and "Astrea," her code names for Scott...

August 5

1920 Writing Jacob's Room every morn ing, Virginia Woolf felt "each day's work like a fence which I have to ride at, my heart in my mouth till it's over, and I've cleared, or knocked the bar out."

August 4

1866 John Morley, in the Saturday Review, on Algernon Swnburne's Poems and Ballads: "No language is too strong to condemn the mixed vileness and childishness of depicting the spurious passion of a putrescent imagination, the unnamed lusts of sated wantons, as if they were the crown of character and their enjoyment the great glory of human life."

August 3

1890 When John Addington Symonds encountered the "Calamus" poems, with their celebration of love between men, in Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass in the 1860's, he said they "made another man of me." For the next two decades he wrote to Whitman - and sometimes exasperated him - with his admiration, but finally on this day, with both their lives nearly over, he made his questions as explicit as he could:...

August 2

1779 Fanny Burney's play The Witlings seemed to amuse its audience of family and friends at its first reading, but afterward her beloved father and their close family friend Samuel Crisp, fearing scandal from its satire, wrote her what she called a "hissing, groaning, catcalling epistle," demanding she suppress it. Burney, already celebrated as the author of the novel Evelina, was stunned -...

August 1

1866 One his forty-seventh birthday, Herman Melville played croquet. His sister, observing from a hammock, noted, "Herman was quite a hand at it."

July 31

1771 Benjamin Franklin was sixty-five an old man by his own estimation but still caught yup in the ferment of his time, when he took advantage of two weeks' leisure at the home of the bishop of St. Asaph in Hampshire, England, to begin his Autobiography, most likely on this day. Tradition has it that each evening he read the day's draft for the entertainment of the bishop's family...

July 30

1915 Confronted by game wardens with a dead blue heron in his boat on Walloon Lake in Michigan, fifteen-year-old Ernest Hemingway denied that he had shot the bird. He later admitted his crime to a judge and paid a $15 fine.

July 29

1836 Charlotte Brontë began work as a teacher at Miss Wooler's School.

July 28

1841 The discovery in the Hudson River of the body of a young woman, soon identified as that of Mary Rogers, a beautiful cigar-shop clerk who had disappeared three days before, became the story of the summer in the New York newspapers. A year later, when no murderer had been found, Edgar Allan Poe proposed to solve the crime himself, through the person of C. Auguste Dupin, the fictional detective...

July 27

1656 "Cursed be he by day and cursed be he by night; cursed be he when he lies down, and cursed be he when he rises up, cursed be he when he goes out, and cursed be he when he comes in." read the decree of expulsion of Baruch Spinoza for heresy from the Jewish community in Amsterdam on this day. "We order that no one should communicate with him orally or in writing, or show him any favour...

July 26

1849 The industrious Anthony Trollope, employed by the post office in Ireland, set out to solve the mystery of currency vanishing in the local mails by scratching a sovereign with a knife, enclosing it in a letter, and tracking its course, When it disappeared after passing through the town of Tralee, a search was made and the coin found in the possession of a young postmistress...

July 25

1914 At age eleven, while sailing from Barcelona to New York, Anaïs Non began her diary.

Wiki: "Richard Chopping, commissioned to paint a toad for the original cover of Ian Fleming’s You Only Live Twice, reported back to Fleming’s editor that [...] he had spent the previous day trudging through the swamps of Suffolk to find a suitable specimen, which now lived on mealworms under a glass dome in his studio."

July 24

1895 Sigmund Freud's Interpretation of Dreams had sold only a handful of copies when the doctor wrote to his colleague Wilhelm Fleiss, "Do you suppose that someday one will read on a marble tablet on this house: 'Here, on July 24, 1895, the secret of the dream revealed itself to Dr. Sigm. Freud.' Sao far there is little prospect of it." Freud's dream that fateful night, about a patient named Irma...