A Long, Long Time Ago…

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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.

78 thoughts on “A Long, Long Time Ago…”

  2. Hey, Dave and Misty… what are those ants up to? Those are the tiniest ear plugs I’ve ever seen.

    Rush’s new drummer is fabulous. I am so impressed.

    Book millstones… erm milestones , let’s see?

    I must mention Sherlock Homes. The first book, A Study in Scarlet, was published in 1887; 139 years ago.

    Plays, movies and tv productions are endless. Young Sherlock, a pastiche to the original character and books, is a popular TV show today… up for Emmy nominations.

    I just did a mural post Sherlock Holmes Walk.

    Does Sherlock Holmes count?

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  3. As always, Dave, your posts make me think, think, think. We really are youngsters here in the U.S., aren’t we? I think the foundation of my love for Europe is old stone — giving testament to the passage of time. I smiled when I read the modern paperback didn’t arrive until 1935. I suppose I’d heard that at some point…but stunning, really, as a counterpoint to other tidbits shared here. Makes me think about gatherings in the past, people coming together to listen to an orator when storytelling was more congregate. Thoughts swirling for me! Thanks much! 😊💝😊

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  4. Hi Dave!

    Thank you for such an interesting post!

    I wouldn’t mind reading that first novel by the Japanese writer. I wonder what it was about!!

    I also really appreciated the information about the origins of the literature awards. I didn’t realise, ‘The Age of Innocence’ won the Pulitzer Prize! A great book! The film is excellent too!

    A great post!

    Thanks again!

    Sharon 📚

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    • Thank you, Ada! There definitely seems to be things like “stone plaques” (if there is such a term) in Westminster in addition to the tombs. I visited so many years ago that I can’t picture it in my mind anymore, but it’s quite a place.

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  6. I’ll add a fact! Remember that before books, there were scrolls. The first bound books, which were handwritten, were called codices (singular = codex), and by the 5th century, the Christian church had replaced scrolls with codices for everything they wrote. It makes sense. Imagine trying to find a passage of the Bible to cite when you had to go through a thirty-foot scroll! Imagine storing the scrolls!

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  7. I’ve a couple of thoughts today, rather radical I felt. The Big Bang Theory for the universe seems appropriate, or at least in part of CERN. This place is very important by Geneva and there are some interesting books; there like The Particle at the End of the Universe: How the Hunt for the Higgs Boson Leads Us to the Edge of a New World by Sean Carroll, also Massive: The Missing Particle That Sparked the Greatest Hunt in Science by Ian Sample. However, the best is this – Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web by Tim Berners-Lee – back in the day, I never thought this WWW would ever catch on. How wrong I was!

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    • Thank you, Chris! Great mentions! The creation of the Internet was certainly an ENORMOUS thing — in all kinds of ways, including for books. I remember how exotic the “World Wide Web” seemed when I first logged into it at work in the mid-1990s.

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  8. I’m not great on dates, Dave, I don’t even mark ‘milestone’ events in my own life (like 50 years married last December), so I’ll sit this one out. Interested to see some of those you’ve noted though, including those Mesapotamian libraries from which fragments of ‘The Epic of Gilgamesh’ was dug up–thereby enabling me to blog about it a few weeks back! Have a good week and catch you next time. 🙂

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  10. Maybe the best thing about technology is that we can learn about books that have been tucked away in odd corners of the world forever.

    I recently read about the (what they think is) the first poem written in English being discovered in Rome. It was written more than 1,300 years ago. It pretty much had to be translated to modern English but it’s very cool find.

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  11. I really enjoyed reading this post, which leads us across history. As you mention the first libraries in Mesopotamia I would like to mention the very interesting “There are rivers in the sky” by Elif Shafak, which shows as how everything that happened and still happens is connected. And that, for example, the very educated king Ashurbanipal from Mesopotamia, who was very educated, was not for that less cruel! The clay tablets also ended in the British Museum!

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  12. Interesting literary beginnings and milestones, Dave. I was surprised to learn that a woman wrote the very first novel. Other book-related milestones I would like to add relate to the Anglophone Caribbean Region. These include Derrick Walcott (1930-2017) and V.S. Naipaul (1932-2018), Caribbean authors who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1992 and 2001, respectively. The British Booker Prize for Fiction was first awarded in 1969.

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  14. Thank you Dave for a wonderful walk through history, music and books. A great way to start my day. You reminded me, once again, how remarkable it is that some voices can travel across thousands of years and still speak to us. One of my favourite examples is Sappho. More than 2,500 years ago she wrote:

    “Someone, I tell you, will remember us, even in another time.”

    And here we are, still reading and talking about her words. Always a joy to stop by and enter the discussion!!

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  15. Well, for all his otherworldly intelligence he wasn’t necessarily what I’d call a nice character. But, yes, his intellectual prowess and his exploits and achievements were pretty unique.

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  16. I just finished reading The Maniac by Julian Bigelow. The Maniac is a dazzling fictionalized biography of János (“John”) Neumann, the Hungarian born mathematician, who not only built the first computer (operational in 1951), with all core features of modern computers (CPU, RAM, and programmable), but theorized, wrote about and laid the foundations for artificial intelligence as we see that skyrocket in our time.

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    • Thank you, Dingenom! That fictionalized biography of János (“John”) Neumann does sound amazing, as were Neumann’s accomplishments — which I was not aware of until seeing your comment. What an influential person!

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    • Thank you, Maggie! I was surprised at how new the modern paperback was, too!

      The Gutenberg museum must indeed be fascinating. I see that it’s in Mainz; I’ve been to Germany only once — mostly in Frankfurt.

      Rush’s concerts this past week were in Los Angeles, and I’m across the country in New Jersey. Would love to attend one of their concerts in NYC this summer, but the shows are sold out and resale tickets are a bit beyond my budget. But it’s fun watching some of the MANY videos posted. 🙂

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