In July 1995, the company began service and sold its first book on Amazon.com: Douglas Hofstadter's Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought.

Nineteen Eighty-Four depicts a world of perpetual war, omnipresent government surveillance, and public manipulation, dictated by a political system that persecutes individualism and independent thinking as "thoughtcrime".

Chapter 7 of Lord of the Flies is titled "Shadows and Tall Trees," which U2 used as the final track on their debut album, Boy.

In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, bounty hunter Rick Deckard signs on to a new police mission to earn enough money to buy a live animal to replace his electric sheep. The mission involves hunting down ("retiring") a group of six Nexus-6 androids that went rogue and fled from Mars to Earth. The book served as the primary basis for Ridley Scott's 1982 film Blade Runner.

Sir John Falstaff is a fictional character who appears in three plays by William Shakespeare. In Henry IV, Part 1 and Part 2, he is a companion to Prince Hal, the future king. In The Merry Wives of Windsor, he is the buffoonish suitor of two married women.

Ray Bradbury, author of Fahrenheit 451, was a descendant of one of the Salem witches, Mary Perkins Bradbury, who was sentenced to hang in 1692 but managed to escape and evade capture until the trials had been discredited. She died in 1700 at the age of 85.

Western writer Louis L'Amour received 200 rejections before he was finally published. His novels have now sold more than 320 million copies worldwide.

Owing to failing eyesight, James Joyce wrote much Finnegans Wake in crayon on pieces of cardboard.

Fitzgerald's novel provides us with the first known uses of the words "T-shirt" and "daiquiri."

The phrase "dark horse" comes from Benjamin Disraeli's 1831 novel The Young Duke, in which such a horse is the surprise winner at the races.