Life sentence for Europe’s first smoker – Society

On this day, 80 years ago, the Pravda newspaper writes about the highest royalties and the first European smoker, and the Vreme newspaper brings the story of a black sweater and a fine.

Photo: Matea Milošević / Svetozar Marković University Library

In 1940, the Pravda newspaper published stories about Roy Harris, the man who received the highest royalties in the world, and about the Spaniard Rodrigo de Jerez, the first person to dare to smoke in Europe.

A world-renowned playwright, Bernard Shaw, received the highest royalties for his literary work. An American publisher decided to pay Shaw a dollar for each word and, in addition, each punctuation mark was counted as one word.

Despite the huge fee and the way Shaw got it, a man named Roy Harris managed to beat it. A metalworker in the United States received an incredible sum of five thousand dollars for a title, of just three words.

The three-word title was searched for a film competition in which 132,000 fans participated. They were looking for the most appropriate and ingenious title for a great Hollywood movie that was being made at the time.

Among the many first prize nominees, Roy came in first place, receiving $ 1,666 and 66 cents for each word written. It can be said that Harris, very happy, received the highest royalties in the world.

Spanish Rodrigo de Jerez was the first man who dared to smoke in Europe. From his friend in America, De Jerez received a large packet of tobacco, which he liked very much on that occasion.

Since he received the package, he started smoking from home, which his wife did not like at all, considering that he damaged their curtains and furniture with tobacco smoke. Seeing that he did not stop, Mr. De Jerez decided to report him to the Inquisition, for which on that occasion he was sentenced to life imprisonment.

He was released at the age of sixteen, and in his hometown, in the home of his descendants, a commemorative plaque was discovered with the inscription: “Here the martyr of smoking, Rodrigo de Jerez, was born. This monument was erected to him by grateful smokers from Spain ”, writes the daily Pravda.

The complete edition can be read at the link of the National Library.

The Vreme newspaper writes about the “black sweater” case for which there was an insult, a lawsuit, but also a fine of 900 dinars.

The life of a philosophy student, Slobodanka, was complicated when Ms. Ilić asked to borrow a black sweater.

Mrs. Ilic needed a sweater to show her daughter. Although Slobodanka moved out after a month, she started visiting us more often because of that sweater, which seemed to swallow the ground.

Ilicka procrastinated, giving various excuses to insult the student at the end, telling her that she didn’t even give her a sweater.

The student went with her colleague, the lady’s son, to see her aunt, but in reality she only heard the insults for which Ilićka ended up in court.

Her husband tried to plead with Slobodanka to drop the lawsuit, but she wanted to seek justice. In the end, the judge found the accused guilty of evasion and insult.

You can read more about this at the National Library link.

Every day, the Danas newspaper flips through the main news of this day 80 years ago, in 1940 to be exact. The subject of the analysis is the Vreme and Pravda newspapers, which do not exist today. The idea is for readers to go back in time, to see from a distance what the news was like, but also how journalists, and their fellow citizens, thought in Serbia in the turbulent period between the two wars and before the start of the Second War. World. In addition to political news, we will also publish social and economic news, but also from the field of entertainment and sports.

The project was carried out in cooperation with material from digital archives of the National Library of Serbia I University libraries “Svetozar Markovic”.

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