St. Martin's Day, also known as the Feast of St. Martin, Martinstag or Martinmas, the Feast of St Martin of Tours or Martin le Miséricordieux, is a time for feasting celebrations. This is the time when autumn wheat seeding was completed, and the annual slaughter of fattened cattle produced "Martinmas beef". Historically, hiring fairs were held where farm laborers would seek new posts. November 11 is the feast day of St. Martin of Tours, who started out as a Roman soldier. He was baptized as an adult and became a monk. It is understood that he was a kind man who led a quiet and simple life. The most famous legend of his life is that he once cut his cloak in half to share with a beggar during a snowstorm, to save the beggar from dying of the cold. That night he dreamed that Jesus was wearing the half-cloak Martin had given away. Martin heard Jesus say to the angels: "Here is Martin, the Roman soldier who is not baptised; he has clothed me."

From the late 4th century to the late Middle Ages, much of Western Europe, including Great Britain, engaged in a period of fasting beginning on the day after St. Martin's Day, November 11. This fast period lasted 40 days, and was, therefore, called "Quadragesima Sancti Martini", which means in Latin "the forty days of St. Martin." At St. Martin's eve, people ate and drank very heartily for a last time before they started to fast. This period of fasting was later shortened and called "Advent" by the Church.

Operation Sea Lion (German: Unternehmen Seelöwe) was Germany's plan to invade the United Kingdom during the Second World War, beginning in 1940. To have had any chance of success, however, the operation would have required air and naval supremacy over the English Channel. With the German defeat in the Battle of Britain, Sea Lion was postponed indefinitely on 17 September 1940 and never carried out.

By early November 1939, Adolf Hitler had decided on forcing a decision in the West by invading Belgium, the Netherlands and France. With the prospect of the Channel ports falling under Kriegsmarine (German Navy) control and attempting to anticipate the obvious next step that might entail, Grand Admiral (Großadmiral) Erich Raeder (head of the Kriegsmarine) instructed his operations officer, Kapitän Hans Jürgen Reinicke, to draw up a document examining "the possibility of troop landings in England should the future progress of the war make the problem arise." Reinicke spent five days on this study and set forth the following prerequisites:

St. Martin's Press is a book publisher headquartered in the Flatiron Building in New York City. Currently, St. Martin's Press is one of the United States' largest publishers,^{[citation needed]} bringing to the public some 700 titles a year under eight imprints, which include St. Martin's Press (mainstream and bestseller books), St. Martin's Griffin (mainstream paperback books, including science fiction and romance), Minotaur (mystery, suspense, and thrillers), Picador (specialty books), Thomas Dunne Books (suspense and mainstream), and Truman Talley Books (business and speciality books). St. Martin's Press's current editor in chief is George Witte.

Macmillan Publishers of the United Kingdom founded St. Martin's in 1952 and named it for St. Martin's Lane in London, where associated press Macmillan Publishers was headquartered. It was privately held until the late 1990s when it was sold to Holtzbrinck Publishers, LLC, a group of publishing companies held by Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck, a family-owned publishing concern based in Stuttgart, Germany, which still owns St. Martin's as well as other U.S. publishers, including Farrar, Straus and Giroux (primarily a publisher of literary fiction), Holt Publishers (literary non-fiction), and Tor-Forge Books (science fiction, fantasy, and thrillers).