The first book printed in English is The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye, a prose romance by Raoul Lefevre, printed by William Caxton in 1474 in Bruges, Belgium.
Caxton himself translated it from the French.
Caxton also printed the first dated book printed in English, Dictes and Sayenges of the Phylosophers, published on November 18, 1477.
Miss Lonelyhearts’ real name was never given.
The golliwog, a type of doll known as “the blackest gnome,” was invented by Florence K. Upton in The Adventures of Two Dutch Dolls and a “Golliwog” (1895). More golliwog tales followed until 1909.
Sir Edward Dyer said, “My mind to me a kingdom is” in his 1588 poem of the same name.
Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego were three Jews who were thrown into a fiery furnace by order of King Nebuchadnezzar in chapter 3 of the Old Testament Book of Daniel, as punishment for refusing to worship a golden idol. God saved them, however, allowing them to walk through the fire unharmed.
The first sentence of Herman Melville’s Moby Diek was “Call me Ishmael.”
Taken from the Greek word semeion, or “sign,” the term “semiotics” had its origins early in the twentieth century, when French linguist Ferdinand de Saussure and American philosopher C. S. Peirce called for a new science of signs. Saussure called the discipline “semiology”; Peirce called it “semiotic.” Since then, semiotics as the study of cultural…