Smileys, 1881  Late 19th Century emoticons, via The Retronaut PK Note: For a year, I was working on the Google Print project in Oxford, and one of the books we encountered (whose name I have completely forgotten) arrived in it's own white box, featuring an average size book with an additional smaler one. The books were basically printshop humour of the time, early examples of text-based art, such as emoticon smilies and character decoration. It wasn't suitable for digitalization as it was published on the cusp of the copyright window (no books during and after 1885 were processed), but it was a fantastic little discovery.
{}