On This Day ...

1860: J.M. Barrie, author of Peter Pan, began the process of growing up. Despite a recent biographical movie to the contrary, he looked nothing at all like Johnny Depp, and in fact won every Edgar Allan Poe lookalike contest he ever entered. He was a notorious fanboy, corresponding with Robert Louis Stephenson, co-writing a musical with Arthur Conan Doyle(!), writing and directing a Western(!) which features George Bernard Shaw(!), and playing cricket with H.G. Wells, G.K. Chesterton and A.A. Milne. He also co-founded the Three Names Club, specifically to exclude Thomas Hardy.

1945: The Germans finally agreed to cease and desist their overly aggressive marketing of Hitler's Mein Kampf to a disinterested Europe. Later that year, the Japanese would come to accept that Asia just wasn't into Kabuki.

1950: L. Ron Hubbard unleashes Dianetics, subsequently solving all problems. This is the only book in history to have sold more copies than the number of people who have bought it. (Some people, obviously worried that a single copy might wear out, buy it "by the armful".)

1955: Your parents tuned in to the first appearance of a sock puppet who is more successful than you will ever be.

1976: Norwegian novelist and playwright Jens Bjørneboe proved he really was a nihilist, dude. Ulrike Meinhof, who was just as bad a terrorist as she was a writer, tried the Sylvia Plath technique for raising the bid on the print rights for her memoirs.