I'd like to retract my comment below about the possible earliest use of a smiley, or emoticon, in print.

Etymologist Barry Popik, who found the advertisement I mention below, was in China, Tibet and Mongolia (and is still there, I think), but I sent him a message asking him to confirm that it *was* a punctuation-based smiley and not a yellow-faced-Harvey-Ball-type smiley. In his original message, he used ":)" to desginate a smiley that appeared in the ad--but he now confirms (from the airport at Ulaan Baatar, no less) that it *was not* the emoticon. He was merely using the emoticon to render the Harvey Ball-type smiley, the yellow round one. Therefore, my comment was misinformed, and the 1953 advertisement should *not* be considered an early appearance of the now-familiar ":)".