The most significant events in the history of books on the 8th of December
1626: John Davies dies. A minor poet who was championed in the twentieth century by T. S. Eliot, Davies was an accomplished calligrapher as well as a poet and courtier. This led Jonathan Bate, in his biography of Shakespeare, Soul of the Age, to propose the theory that Davies was the ‘rival poet’ in Shakespeare’s Sonnets.
The most significant events in the history of books on the 7th of December
43 BC: Cicero is assassinated. As well as being an influential orator and writer, Cicero rose to be a hugely powerful statesman in Rome, and he clashed with the consul, Mark Antony, who declared Cicero an enemy of the state. Before Cicero could leave Rome, he was set upon and killed by two men. As well as his speeches he wrote a huge number of treatises on various political subjects.
The most significant events in the history of books on the 6th of December
1478: Baldassare Castiglione is born. This Italian soldier and diplomat is best remembered for The Book of the Courtier (1528), a book written over many years in the form of a philosophical dialogue. It sums up Renaissance Europe: when an English translation appeared in 1561 it helped to define the idea of the English gentleman.
1658: Baltasar Gracián dies. A Spanish writer and philosopher, his wisest witticism, for our money, is the following: ‘A synonym is a word you use when you can’t spell the other one.’
The most significant events in the history of books on the 5th of December
1784: Phillis Wheatley dies. The first black poet of the Americas to publish a book, Wheatley was an eighteenth-century black slave taught to read by her owners. She composed over 100 poems in her lifetime. You can read some of her poetry in this interesting post about her.
The most significant events in the history of books on the 4th of December
1131: Omar Khayyám dies. This Persian poet and mathematician wrote the Rubaiyat (or ‘quatrains’), later translated into English by several Victorian poets, most famously by Edward FitzGerald.
1835: Samuel Butler is born. This unusual Victorian novelist is best known for The Way of All Flesh (1903), a semi-autobiographical novel that attacked Victorian hypocrisy and religion so vehemently that Butler arranged for the novel only to be published after his death.