Google Doodles: Bram Stoker’s 165th birthday and some of our past favourites

It’s Bram Stoker’s 165th birthday today and Google has created a cobwebbed doodle to celebrate. The gothic vampire title Dracula is, of course, the Irish novelist’s most famous work, originally published in 1897. In April this year, the Penguin English Library edition of the classic was published and is available to purchase here. You can also read a sample of the blood spattered Vintage Classics edition here. Other works Stoker penned include the tale of an Egyptian queen, The Jewel of Seven Stars (1903), and that of a strange Derbyshire estate, The Lair of the White Worm (1911).

Just a few weeks ago, there was a Google Doodle of Moby Dick to celebrate the 161st anniversary of its publication. And in 2011, I  rounded up my favourite literary doodles in Google’s history.

The first Google Doodle appeared in 1998 when the search engine’s founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page stuck a stick figure behind the second “o” in “Google”, intended as a comical message to Google users that the founders were out of office—they had gone on holiday to the Burning Man Festival in the Nevada desert. It was only two years later that it started to become a tradition, and over 1000 Google Doodles have since been produced. A team of illustrators and engineers create these doodles.

Kimberley Chen

Kimberley Chen is a London-based writer.

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