A Book of Days for the Literary Year would make a terrific gift for the friend or relative who loves to read, but you don't know what they haven't read yet.
This handy book is like a calendar, only without assigning days of the week (Monday, Tuesday, etc.) to each day of the month (1st, 2nd, etc.). This is a nice feature that enables the book to be used for more than one year. Not a good feature if you have a problem keeping track of what the date is in the first place.
In any case, if you're into literary trivia, you'll be in heaven 365 days a year. A Book of Days will give you your fill of birth dates, death dates, marriages, and other notable events in the lives of a wealth of literary greats. For instance, I am writing this on November 5. On that date, according to A Book of Days:
1664 Samuel Pepys writes in his Diary that he has been to see Macbeth, a "pretty good play." 1885 Will Durant, historian (The Story of Civilization), is born in North Adams, Mass. 1893 Willa Cather, 20, begins contributing to the Nebraska State Journal, for which she is paid $1 per column. 1930 When Sinclair Lewis receives a telephone call from a Swedish newspaper correspondent telling him he is the first American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, Lewis thinks it is a prank and begins imitating the man's accent."
And this is just one day of the year! Imagine how many other salacious tidbits you'll find out through A Book of Days. I believe this book may have gone out of print, but copies should still be available through major booksellers, or used through Amazon.com.
