First Day of Class Again

I had my first day of class for this semester: Contemporary American Novel. There is a list of 13 books, most of which have won the Pulitzer in the last few years. Everyone in the class was talking about how they had already read like nine of the books on the list. I have read exactly one book on the list. And I read it last semester. But who wants to read Pulitzer Prize-winning novels when you can be reading "Twilight" instead?

So, in class, my professor asked the rhetorical question, "What was the first book printed in the West?" Meaning, Western Civilization, not the American West. The girl next to me was like, "The Bible?" I said, "The Fall of Troy," because being so close-minded as I am, I always take West to mean England because really that's where all the good stuff happened. And I actually placed my little grubby hands on a first edition of the Fall of Troy last semester at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, so yeah, I kind of know that's the first book ever printed in England. You can imagine my astonishment, then, when my professor proceeds to answer his own question saying, "Thomas Malory's Morte d'Arthur." WHAAAAT?!? That is just not true. He is just plain wrong. I wrote my Master's thesis on that book, and it was not the first book printed in England, much less the entire West. No, no, no. Maybe if by "book" he meant "novel" you might have an argument, but even that issue is hotly contested (well, you know, as hot as those contests get). What should I have done? Should I have corrected him so the room full of my fellow grad students would not be grossly misinformed? I'll tell you what I did do. I turned to the girl next to me and whispered, "That's not true!" in a scandalized voice and then just stopped listening.