What day was your favorite novel (or other piece of literature) published?

[Some Android]

So I decided to do this thing where I just carry around this small book I make and one each page of the book there are two things written:

-a day of the year
-a piece of literature published on that day

I want to do this as sort of a conversation starter with people I just meet and to perhaps enlighten them that their birthday shares the anniversary of the publication of a piece of literature. I know - a little eccentric.

Anyway to make the task easier for me so that I'm just not looking the publications of random pieces of literature I'd thought I ask people here.

[GloatingSwine]

Actual publication dates for most literary works aren't strongly recorded, especially if they're from more than a couple of years ago. It may not be possible to tie individual works down to closer than a year of publication, especially if they weren't originally in English or are very old.

For example my favourite novel is Foucault's Pendulum, and I can find a review of it from 12 Oct. 1989 but that's not going to be the publication date of the book but the edition of the newspaper that reviewed it, and it was published in Italian the year before that.

[Ninja_Prawn]

Actual publication dates for most literary works aren't strongly recorded.

It's true. Just checked my copy of my favourite book, The Dispossessed, and it just says 1974. Wikipedia is similarly vague. Goodreads claims May 1974, but I don't know if I trust it.

[DavidSh]

For The Dispossessed, the ISFDB also says May 1974, and I tend to believe them. Collectively, they have access to first editions and to early reviews.

Publication information finer-grained than monthly may not exist, but if you have access to a major research library, you can probably find publisher's announcements in trade magazines back a good number of decades, at least for US releases. Italian releases may be a different story.

[Lvl 2 Expert]

The Three Musketeers (which I haven't actually read (yet) but which is certainly one of those titles people recognize) was published from March 14 to July 1 1844 (https://www.biblio.com/the-three-musketeers-by-dumas-alexandre/work/3218), in a newspaper, one chapter at a time.

Voila, two dates, a title, and a historical tidbit.

But yeah, the concept may or may not work very well depending on how well you can trace exact dates of publication of those kinds of books you're interested in. With Shakespeare's plays apparently we're lucky if we can still trace the exact year of publication.

[Aedilred]

Yeah, I think this is going to be tricky.

It would take a lot of digging, in many cases probably isn't available, and before a certain point was almost certainly not consistent. If you had a publisher in London, it could take a couple of days before copies of that book reached bookshops in Manchester. But shops in London would probably start selling immediately, because why wouldn't you?

I suspect that having a single universal release date (which is really the key point for publication purposes) in Britain at least is probably a product of the expansion of the chain bookshops in the 90s (if everyone's an indie, there's no incentive to insist on simultaneous release), and even moreso following the end of the NBA and the rise of the internet, which not only made bestseller books more of a going concern outside the relatively narrow confines of the specialist bookshop but also made it trivial for people to discuss the book widely and immediately, without regard for geographic distribution.

Then there are multiple editions of the same book - serialisation was common for 19th-century novels as a means of first release and then they'd be released as a proper novel afterwards. Or versions which were released once, then heavily edited and reissued. Which becomes the publication date for this purpose?

Now, you could do it for films, and that would be much easier.

Having said that and while I like a good anniversary as much as the next man, I worry that this project - or rather, the manner in which it's intended to be used - goes beyond "eccentric" and into "weird". I fear that with most people it would serve not so much as a conversation starter as a conversation stopper.