1897 | Literature
Literature
A massive, ornate Library of Congress is completed at Washington, D.C. Built to house the books that have piled up in a room at the Capitol since 1851, the Renaissance-style structure will be augmented in future years by additional buildings.
Publishers Weekly reports that 5,703 new books and new editions were published last year in the United States.
The Monotype typesetting machine introduced by inventor Tolbert Lanston, now 53, is more practical for book publishers than the Merganthaler Linotype of 1884 (see 1887). Lanston obtained his first patents for the machine in 1885, it incorporates a 120-key keyboard machine that perforates paper rolls in certain patterns, each pattern representing a character; the perforations go into a caster and release matrices from which the characters are cast in single metal types (but not in complete lines), the Monotype assembles the types automatically to form lines, and the lines are then made up into pages.
Nonfiction: Following the Equator by Mark Twain, whose humorous account of his round-the-world lecture tour enjoys so much popularity that its sales will enable him to pay off the $35,000 debt that has hung over his head since 1893; History of Canada by poet Charles G. D. Roberts, who moves to New York, where he will work as a journalist until his return in 1911.
Dictionary of Phrase and Fable compiler Ebenezer C. Brewer dies at his native London March 6 at age 86; Historian-art critic Jacob Burckhardt dies at his native Basel August 8 at age 79.
Fiction: Liza of Lambeth by English novelist W. (William) Somerset Maugham, 23; Captains Courageous by Rudyard Kipling; Dracula by Dublin-born English writer Bram (originally Abraham) Stoker, 50, who is secretary and business adviser to English actor Sir Henry Irving, now 59 (the first actor to be knighted). Stoker has read up on vampire folklore and Transylvania at the British Museum and embellished the historic Vlad Dracula, who did not drink blood but did have hordes of people impaled on spears, high or low depending on their rank, and had other victims blinded, strangled, and boiled alive (see politics, 1476); The Nigger of the 'Narcissus' by Joseph Conrad; The Spoils of Poynton and What Maisie Knew by Henry James; The Invisible Man and The Platiner Story (short stories) by H. G. Wells; The Understudy (La Doublure) by French novelist Raymond Roussel, 20; The Horses of Diomede (Les Chevaux de Diomède) by Rémy de Gourmont; Patience Sparhawk and Her Times by San Francisco-born novelist Gertrude (Franklin) Atherton (née Horn), 39; The Skipper's Wooing by W. W. Jacobs.
Author William Taylor "Oliver Optic" Adams dies at Dorchester, Massachusetts, March 27 at age 74; novelist-short story writer Alphonse Daudet at Champrosay December 16 at age 57, having suffered excruciating pain in recent years from a spinal cord illness related to the venereal disease that has plagued him for decades.
Poetry: Fruits of the Earth (Les Nourritures terrestres) by French writer (and hedonist) André Gide, 28, whose prose poem becomes almost a bible to restless young pleasure seekers (Gide married his cousin Madeleine in October 1895 and they will remain unhappily married until her death in 1938); Jeanne d'Arc by French poet Charles Péguy, 24; Lou Pouèmo dóu Rose by Frédéric Mistral, now 67; "Recessional" by Rudyard Kipling on the occasion of Queen Victoria's second jubilee (in the Times July 17): "God of our fathers, known of old/ Lord of our far-flung battle-line,/ Beneath whose awful Hand we hold/ Dominion over palm and pine/ Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,/ Lest we forget—lest we forget!"