A hundred years ago today, on October 14, 1926, British author A.A. Milne published Winnie-the-Pooh, according to HISTORY.com. The children's book follows a honey-loving bear of very little brain and his friends who live in the Hundred Acre Wood, and with illustrations by E.H. Shepard, the story and its characters went on to become global classics, the site says.

Milne drew inspiration from his own household: HISTORY.com reports that he and his wife, Daphne, gave their son, Christopher Robin, a teddy bear from the Harrods department store for his first birthday, and that Eeyore, Piglet, Kanga and Tigger were also toys in the boy's nursery. The Ashdown Forest near the family's Sussex home helped inspire the setting, the site says.

The name traces back to a real animal: HISTORY.com says Lieutenant Harry Colebourn, a Canadian soldier and veterinarian, bought a black bear cub in Ontario in 1914, named her Winnipeg after the city where he lived, and left her at the London Zoo when he was deployed to France during World War I. Christopher was among the children who visited the bear, and he later renamed his own birthday teddy Winnie the Pooh.

A Columbia University library post says three firms first put the book out: Methuen in England, E. P. Dutton in the United States and McClelland and Stewart in Canada. The post says the first Pooh story ran in a London paper, The Evening News, on Christmas Eve in 1925.

HISTORY.com says Pooh returned in the 1927 poetry collection Now We Are Six and in The House at Pooh Corner in 1928, and it says the stories have been translated into about 70 languages and have sold more than 50 million copies.

What we know: Winnie-the-Pooh first came out on October 14, 1926, with art by E.H. Shepard.
What we don't: The cited pages do not give first-year sales figures for the book.