I have no idea, but my guess is that they don't know the dates for some books and the system automatically classifies the publication date as "1900" or "1901." If you search the word "quark," you also get a bump at around 1900 even though the word wasn't coined until Joyce's Finnegans Wake in 1939.
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Utterly awesome. http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=My+name+is+Inigo+...
Potentially even more awesome is that they have the entire dataset available for download o_O
edit: case sensitivity is more fun than insensitivity: http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=Star+Trek%2Cstar+... vs http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=star+trek%2CStar+...
edit2: there are a whole bunch of geek-term bumps around and just after 1900. Anyone know why? E.g.: http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=Star+Wars&yea...
I have no idea, but my guess is that they don't know the dates for some books and the system automatically classifies the publication date as "1900" or "1901." If you search the word "quark," you also get a bump at around 1900 even though the word wasn't coined until Joyce's Finnegans Wake in 1939.