The most significant events in the history of books on the 18th of December
1870: Saki is born Hector Hugh Munro. He enlisted after the outbreak of WWI, though he probably could have avoided service altogether. He became a successful writer of very short stories such as ‘The Lumber Room’ and ‘Tobermory’ (about a talking cat) under the pen-name of Saki, which was taken from either the name of a cupbearer in the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám or a type of South American monkey.
The most significant events in the history of books on the 17th of December
1273: Rumi dies. Rumi (1207-1273), born Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī, was a Sufi mystic poet from Persia. Rumi was a Muslim follower of the Sufi faith, and he wrote numerous works of Sufi philosophy as well as his poetry. A special service involving whirling dervishes is held at his tomb in Turkey on 17 December every year.
The most significant events in the history of books on the 16th of December
1775: Jane Austen is born. As well as Pride and Prejudice and the five other full-length novels she completed, Austen also wrote a number of other interesting works of fiction (and non-fiction, of a sort): she wrote a History of England while she was still a teenager. In 1791, in her sixteenth year, Austen penned a jocular ‘History of England’ as a parody of the schoolbooks on history she had encountered in her (largely home-schooled) education. The tone is wry and ironic throughout – an early sign of the trademark irony that is found in her mature work.
The most significant events in the history of books on the 15th of December
1683: Izaak Walton dies. He was a biographer who wrote about the lives of a number of key seventeenth-century poets, including the Metaphysical Poets John Donne and George Herbert. However, it is for his 1653 book The Compleat Angler that Walton is chiefly remembered. Charles Lamb recommended the Angler to Samuel Taylor Coleridge: ‘It breathes the very spirit of innocence, purity, and simplicity of the heart.
The most significant events in the history of books on the 14th of December
1640: Aphra Behn is (possibly) born. Few details about Behn’s early life are known for sure, but it’s possible that she was the ‘Eaffrey Johnson’ who was born in Harbledown in Kent, on December 14 1640. Behn is often named as the first woman writer to make a living from her pen (by Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own, for instance); it’s certainly true that she was the first consistently popular female playwright in England whose plays were put on the London stage. She also wrote an early novel (or novella) in English, Oroonoko, about an African prince who is taken to be a slave in South America.