Johannes Gutenberg is often credited as the inventor of the printing press in 1454. But neither printing nor movable type was actually invented by Johannes Gutenberg, nor did he print the first book. The Chinese actually printed from movable type in 1040, but later discarding the method.
Even before printing books from movable type, the Chinese used wooden blocks to print Budhist writings by hand on scrolls. Chinese writer Fenzhi mentioned in his writings Yuan Xian San Ji that woodblocks were used to print Buddhist scripture during the Zhenguan years (627-649 A.D.). The oldest known surviving woodblock-printed work is a Buddhist [more...]
In the year 1007 a Japanese noble woman, Murasaki Shikibu, wrote the world’s first full novel. Called “The tale of Genji,” it tells the story of a prince looking for love and wisdom. In its English translation it covers 54 chapters over 1000 pages of text.
By the Middle Ages there were many novels about kings and heroic knights but in the late 1500s the anti-romance movement took roots and villains became the main characters. The first such novel was “Life of Lazarillo de Tormes”, written in 1554 by an unknown author. It is the story of a poor boy who [more...]
The novel has always had the reputation of being light entertainment, almost bordering on the frivolous. Part of the blame for this reputation can be placed on the word novel itself. The word originally derived from the Latin novus, meaning “new.” It came to English by way of the Italian word for short story, novella. A novella was a short work of prose fiction that told a new, original story, in contrast to retelling a traditional one.
The story in a novella was meant to be a novelty, a new delight for readers. The readers responded, and today there numerous kinds [more...]
English is the second most spoken language in the world – Mandarin is the most spoken – and has more words than any other language. But English speakers generally use only about 1% of the language. About one third of the more than one million English words are technical terms. Still, every decade new words are added to the English language. Here are some of them -
1940’s
ack-ack, apartheid, atom bomb, baby-sit, barf, bazooka, cheeseburger, crash-land, flying saucer, gobbledygook
1950’s
aerospace, alphanumeric, brainstorming, car wash, cha-cha, digitize, do-it-yourself, ethnohistory, in-house, meter maid
1960’s
area code, ASCII, biohazard, Brownie point, crib death, doofus, disco, glitch, microwave [more...]
You may be under the false impression that before you can get your text published, you must “get the copyright” to your own written material. You might also think that in order to get the copyright, you must “apply” for it. This is just not so. In the following few paragraphs, I’ll give you some simple facts about copyrights that may help you in your quest to get published.
First, it is important to understand that you cannot “copyright” an idea; you can only copyright what you have written. That is, you might have just written the greatest self-help manual on [more...]
