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

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...

July 23

1943 The romance of a poet dying young is difficult to resist, and Max Harris, the editor of the Australian poetry journal Angry Penguins, didn't resist it at all when he received a packet of poems by an unknown writer named Ernest Malley from someone claiming to be be Malley's sister, who said her brother had left the poems behind when he died on this day at age twenty-five. In truth, though, Malley...

July 22

1848 John Forsterm, Examiner, on W.M. Thackeray's Vanity Fair: "We are seldom permitted to enjoy the appreciation of all gentle and kind things which we continually get within the book, without some neighbouring quip or sneer that would seem to show the author ashamed of what he yet cannot help giving way to."

July 23

1940 In Mau, H.A. Rey put aside his book illustrations so he and his wife, Margret, German Jews who had met in Brazil and returned to Paris, could begin preparing to leave France ahead of the Nazi invasion, In June, the Reys left Paris on bicycles H.A. had built from spare parts, carrying manuscripts and drawings in their baskets, including one, about a mischievous monkey, called The Adventures of Fifi.

July 20

1754 Robert Louis Stevenson always said that Treasure Island began with a map he sketched to entertain his stepson. At first he called the story it inspired The Sea Cook; only when it neared publication did the book take the name of the map itself, and not until the book's second edition did it include a woodcut of the map, which featured a detail written in its margins but not mentioned in the text...

July 19

1374 Petrarch died, bequeathing Boccaccio fifty florins to buy a dressing gown to warm him during "winter study and lucubrations by night."

July 18

1818 Writing to a friend of his disappointment that women, whom he had thought ethereal, superior creatures, turned out to be roughly equal to men, Keats declined to say anymore: "After all I do think better of Womankind than to suppose they care whether Mister John Keats five feet high likes them or not."

July 17

NO YEAR When Agatha Christie was challenged by a friend to try writing one of the detectives stories she enjoyed so much, she began with the crime. And an ingenious one it was: in the early hours of July 17, Emily Inglethorpe, a wealthy matriarch who had just married a much younger man whom her family considered a fortune-hunting bounder, went into violent convulsions that finally killed her...

July 16

1948 With Jean Genet's many arrests for thievery and other crimes threatening to send him to prison for life just as his novels - often veiled portraits of his life outside the law - were becoming celebrated, Jean Cocteau and Jean-Paul Sartre published an open letter on this day to French president Vincent Auriol requesting a pardon for Genet, so he could devote himself to his work. The pardon was granted...

July 15

1677 or 1684 The illustrated adventures of Tintin take place in an abstracted geography bering only an incomplete resemblance to our own. The intrepid boy reporter's travels take him to countries you could once easily find on a map - Egypt, Tibet, the Soviet Union - but also to more fanciful nations like Sylvia and San Theodore's. And then there is Marlispike Hall, the ancestral home of Sir Francis Haddock..

July 14

1831 The governor of New York, hosting the French visitors Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont, ran into his house for a gun after sighting a squirrel, but "the big man," in Beaumont's words, "had the clumsiness to miss him four times in succession."

July 13

1798 The poem's full title is "Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey, on revisiting the banks of the Wye during a tour, July 13, 1798," and William Wordsworth would later say with pride that he had composed it fully in his head on a walk of four or five days with his sister, Dorothy, before writing it down. Presented as a reflection on the time since his last visit to the Wye five years before...

July 12

1794 On the 24th day of Messier in Year II of the French Republic (according to the new calendar proclaimed by the Revolution), Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, having been forced from his post as small-town mayor by the Jacobins, sailed for the United States, where among his most memorable adventures, recounted thirty years later in his food-lover's classic, The Physiology of Taste, was the shooting...

July 11`

1790 From his deathbed, Adam Smith oversaw the burning of over a dozen uncompleted volumes, including manuscripts for planned "great works" on literature and government.

July 10

1666 Less than two months before the Great Fire of London, a smaller blaze swept through Anne Bradstreet's home in North Andover, Massachusetts, destroying her family's library - massive for the time - of eight hundred volumes and leading her to write the "Verses upon the Burning of Our House, July 10, 1666" that bless that grace of God that "gave and took": ...

July 9

1846 "Ah Flush!, Flush! - he did not hurt you really?" Elizabeth Barrett inquired. "The truth is he hates all unpetticoated people, and though he does to hate you, he has a certain distrust of you." The unptticoated person in question, of course, was Miss Barrett's suitor, Robert Browning, and Flush was her dog, the spaniel who found a further literary fame when Virginia Woolf, exhausted after finishing...

July 8

1848 Alarmed that their novels, Jane Eyre, Withering Heights, and Agnes Grey, written under the pseudonyms of Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell, were being taken as the work of a single author, Charlotte and Anne Brontë - after failing to convince their shy sister, Emily, to join them - set out on the train for London to establish their identities to their publishers...

July 7

1806 A month and a half after his firs son was born, James Mill threw down a challenge to a fellow new father: "I intend to run a fair race with you in the education of a son. Let us have a well-disputed trial which of us twenty years hence can exhibit the most accomplished & virtuous young man." (His competitiveness might be explained by the fact that the other father was William Forbes...

July 6

1483 "Ha! Am I king? 'Tis so. But Edward lives." Shakespeare packed considerable drama into the nine words Richard III, perhaps his most vivid villain, speaks on taking the throne. His play, like most historians, accuses Richard of the murder of the princes Edward and Richard of Shrewsbury, his young rivals for the crown, But the boys' disappearance remains unsolved, and Richard has his defenders...

July 5

1814 "While wading thro' the whimsies, the puerilities, and unintelligible jargon of this work," Thomas Jefferson wrote to John Adams after finishing Plato's Republic for the first time, "I laid it down often to ask myself how it could have been that the world should have so long consented to give reputation to such nonsense as this?"

July 4

1846 Charlotte Brontë submitted the Brontë sisters' first three manuscripts (The Professor, Withering Heights, and Agnes Grey) to H. Colborn, beginning a year of rejection by London publishers.

July 3

1778 After Voltaire's death in May, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart wrote to his father: "That godless arch villain ?Voltaire has died like a dog, like an animal - that's his reward!"

July 2

1861 Searching for the Great Comet of 1861 in the "murky" London sky, George Eliot reported she could only see the red light of a "distant gin-shop."

July 1

1660 Samuel Pepys brought home a "fine Camlett cloak, with gold buttons, and a silk suit": "I pray God to make me able to pay for it."

June 30

1835 "$100 REWARD will be given for the apprehension and delivery of my Servant Girl, HARRIET," read a notice placed in the Norfolk, Virginia, American Beacon by Dr. James Norcom. "As this girl absconded from the plantation of my son without any known cause or provocation, it is probable she designs to transport herself to the North." She had indeed absconded, in fear of Norcomb's designs on her, but...