The Pantheon. (Photo by me during a 2018 trip to Paris.)

It’s been years since some things happened.

For instance, the New York Knicks last night won their first NBA championship since 1973 — a whopping 53 years ago. (A talented/unselfish basketball team unfortunately owned by nasty/despised billionaire James Dolan, who’s best buds with U.S. criminal-in-chief Donald Trump.)

Also, last Sunday the Canadian band Rush launched a sold-out worldwide concert tour — their first since 2015. It’s the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame group’s first tour with virtuoso drummer Anika Nilles of Germany replacing revered drummer/lyricist/multi-book-author Neil Peart, who died in 2020. Nilles joined with Rush singer/bassist/composer Geddy Lee, guitarist/composer Alex Lifeson, and touring keyboardist Loren Gold. (See two videos at the end of this post.)

Both of the above developments remind me that there are also a number of book-related things that happened way in the past, and I’ll discuss some of them today.

The first libraries opened approximately 5,000 years ago in Mesopotamia (now Iraq) as repositories of clay tablets.

Around the 1st century AD, the earliest physical bookstore that historians are aware of appeared in Rome.

What many scholars consider the first novel was written in Japan circa 1010 AD — more than a millennium ago. That was The Tale of Genji, and a woman (Murasaki Shikibu) was the author. Not the most riveting read overall, but it has a number of interesting moments.

Construction of London’s Westminster Abbey as we know it began around 1245. Renowned writers buried there include Chaucer, Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy (partly), and many more. Those memorialized in that building include Jane Austen, the three Bronte sisters, Frances Burney, Lewis Carroll, George Eliot, Henry James, Shakespeare, and numerous others.

It was in 1440 or thereabouts that the Gutenberg printing press was invented, mechanizing book production. That of course led to lower costs for readers, more literacy, etc.

Paris! The Pantheon in that city was completed in 1790, and a number of famous French authors would be among the notables entombed there. Alexandre Dumas, Victor Hugo, Voltaire, Emile Zola…

The Nobel Prize in literature dates back to 1901. Among the high-profile novelists to win that honor are Pearl S. Buck, Albert Camus, William Faulkner, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Nadine Gordimer, Kazuo Ishiguro, Doris Lessing, Ernest Hemingway, Hermann Hesse, Sinclair Lewis, Thomas Mann, Toni Morrison, and John Steinbeck.

Seventeen years later, in 1918, saw the arrival of the Pulitzer Prize for novels — renamed the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1948. Among the early winners more than a century ago were Willa Cather (for One of Ours), Booth Tarkington (The Magnificent Ambersons), and Edith Wharton (The Age of Innocence).

The first modern paperback book was published in 1935. (There were of course pamphlets and such before that.) That paperback was Ariel: The Life of Shelley by André Maurois.

Thoughts on this topic — whether about books, Rush, or the Knicks? Other book-related milestones you’d like to mention?

Literature-inspired song alert! Rush playing “Tom Sawyer” last Sunday: (Watch for the iconic drum fill at around the 3:20 mark.)

Rush this past Thursday performing “The Camera Eye,” with Neil Peart-penned lyrics inspired by the stream-of-consciousness poems in The U.S.A. Trilogy by novelist John Dos Passos:

Misty the cat says: “My speech is about to begin, and the ants will have to listen.”

My comedic 2024 book — the part-factual/part-fictional/not-a-children’s-work Misty the Cat…Unleashed — is described and can be purchased on Amazon in paperback or on Kindle. It’s feline-narrated! (And Amazon reviews are welcome. 🙂 )

This 90-second promo video for the book features a talking cat: 🙂

I’m also the author of a 2017 literary-trivia book…

…and a 2012 memoir that focuses on cartooning and more, including many encounters with celebrities.

In addition to this weekly blog, I write the 2003-started/award-winning “Montclairvoyant” topical-humor column every Thursday for Montclair Local. The latest piece — which comments on my town’s reported use of a bank with financial ties to private operators of cruel for-profit immigration detention centers, and the departure (firing?) of a beloved employee who worked with my town’s seniors — is here.