Here are some interesting facts about books:
1. One out of every eight letters you read is the letter ‘e’.
2. In 1939 an author named Ernest Vincent wrote a
50,000 word novel called Gadsby. The only thing unusual about the novel
is that there is not a single letter ‘e’ in the whole thing.
3. There have been over 20,000 books written about the game of Chess.
4. Perhaps the most uninteresting book ever written
is the calculation of pi to two million places, in 800 pages. Just
think of the TV special that could be made from this script.
5. In the book, Les Miserables by Victor Hugo is
one sentence that is 823 words long. When Vic wrote to his editor
inquiring about their opinion of the manuscript, he wrote, "?" They
answered, "!"
6. If you stretched out all the shelves in the New
York Public Library, they would extend eighty miles. The books most
often requested at this library are about drugs, witchcraft, astrology
and Shakespeare.
7. Interestingly, William Shakespeare invented the word “hurry."
8. And speaking of Shakespeare, can you imagine
John Wayne reciting Shakespeare? Well, he did one time, and won a
Shakespeare contest.
9. The following words were invented by William
Shakespeare: boredom disgraceful hostile money’s worth obscene puke
perplex on purpose shooting star sneak Until his time, people had to
have their conversations without these words.
10. In America, we buy 57 books per second. It would take a shelf 78 miles long to hold all of one day’s books.
11. More than two and a half billion Bibles have
been made. If you put them on a long bookshelf and started driving along
the shelf at 55 mph, you would have to drive 40 hours per week for over
four months to get to the end. All these Bibles would fill the New York
public library 467 and one-half times.
12. The Bible contains 3,566,480 letters, or 810,697 words.
13. Leo Tolstoy wrote a large book called War and
Peace before computers and copying machines. His wife had to copy his
manuscript by hand seven times.
14. Americans buy approximately five million books a day. 125 new titles are published every day.
15. The first published book ever written on a typewriter was The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Mark Twain used a Remington in 1875.
16. It took Noah Webster 36 years to write his first dictionary.
17. Jonathan Swift wrote a classic book called
Gulliver’s Travels that borders on science fiction. It was written
before science fiction was what you called such books. In this book he
wrote about two moons circling Mars. He described their size and speed
of orbit. He did this one hundred years before they were described by
astronomers.
18. The man who wrote the Sherlock Holmes stories,
A. Conan Doyle, was a professional ophthalmologist, an eye doctor.
Because in his time specialty medical practices were hard to build and
didn’t pay well, he had to take up writing to make ends meet.
19. For the last 12 years of his life, Casanova was a librarian.
20. Charles Dickens had to be facing north before he could write a word.
21. There are 72,466,926 books in the Library of Congress on 327 miles of bookshelves.
(credits to my sources :D)
