Laurence Sterne's first known publication is, significantly, his own name. As he tells us in a brief biographical outline written for his beloved daughter Lydia and printed by her under the title ‘Memoirs of the Life and Family of the Late Rev. Mr. Laurence Sterne’ in 1775 (L 1–5), he publicized it on the ceiling of his Yorkshire schoolroom:

This writing on the wall is telling for Sterne's later publications, both in the divided response it elicited as punishable transgression or sign of genius, and in the author's flamboyant gesture of self-advertising. It anticipates what, writ large, was going to be Sterne's express intention when it came to publishing the first instalment of Tristram Shandy in 1759/60: ‘I wrote not [to] be fed, but to be famous’ (L 90). And even if he refrained from putting his name to it, he could not renounce the pleasure of publicizing his authorship on a second title-page to The Sermons of Mr. Yorick a few months after the appearance of Tristram Shandy, vols. 1 and 2: ‘Sermons by Laurence Sterne, A.M. Prebendary of York, and Vicar of Sutton-on-the-Forest, and Stillington near York’ (LY 40). This gave away the authorship of Tristram Shandy as well and added notoriety to fame: it added the notoriety of a veritable vicar donning the fool's cap on the title page of his sermons and not only writing, but actually publishing and publicly acknowledging salaciously bawdy fiction, to the fame of a wittily original and spirited new man of letters, which Sterne, arriving with his book in London, had gleefully harvested with the high and mighty. The country parson's success on the London scene was instantaneous.