How many days and weeks until November 18th?

William Caxton finished printing The Dictes or Sayengis of the Philosophres at Westminster on November 18th 1477. Other books had probably come off his press first, but this is the earliest to carry a date, which makes it the first dated book printed in England. It was translated from the French by Anthony Woodville, Earl Rivers, the queen’s brother, who had borrowed the original from a fellow pilgrim on the way to Compostela. More than a dozen copies survive and not one of them is complete.

Steamboat Willie was released in New York on November 18th 1928, the third Mickey Mouse cartoon made but the first released, and the first animation widely seen with synchronised sound. Walt Disney supplied the mouse’s voice himself for the next twenty years.

Fire broke out under a wooden escalator at King’s Cross Underground station on the evening of November 18th 1987 and killed thirty-one people. The Fennell inquiry found a culture that had treated small escalator fires as routine. Wooden escalators were removed across the network and smoking was banned outright below ground.

Margaret Atwood wrote The Handmaid’s Tale in West Berlin in 1984, and has said she allowed herself nothing in it that had not already happened somewhere. She was born on November 18th 1939. Alan Shepard, the astronaut who became the first American in space, was born in 1923, and Kim Wilde, the British pop singer, in 1960.

Born on November 18th: star sign, birthstone and birth flower

Margaret Atwood and Kim Wilde — both named above — share this star sign with everyone else born in the same window.

None of this is settled fact in the way the history above is — zodiac dates, birthstones and birth flowers are conventions rather than laws, and different sources hedge them slightly differently. The birthstone is the most standardised of the three (set by the trade in 1912 and revised since); the birth flower is the least, resting on Victorian tradition rather than any governing body.

Gift ideas for a November 18th birthday

A small, themed starting point rather than a shopping list — topaz for the stone, Scorpio for the sign, and the sky itself on the day.

November birthstone necklace

A simple pendant in the actual November birthstone colour, from a long-running UK jewellery brand.

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Scorpio constellation necklace

Stainless steel, sign selectable at checkout — choose Scorpio for a November 18th birthday.

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Personalised birth flower & birthstone disc

Engraved with a name, the November birthstone and the chrysanthemum — both in one pendant, in a gift box.

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Personalised star map print

The actual night sky over a chosen place on November 18th, whichever year — a print rather than jewellery.

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