Interesting facts about books and authors

1      Ever wonder what’s the most read book in the world? Well, it’s the Holy Bible.

2      In the book, Les Miserable by Victor Hugo there is one sentence that is 823 words long.

3      In the United States, people buy an average of 57 books per second.

4      It took Noah Webster 36 years to write his first dictionary.

5      One out of every eight letters you read is the letter 'e'.

6      Gadsby was written by Ernest Vincent Wright in 1939. The 50,000 word novel doesn't contain the letter 'e'.

7      J.K. Rowling had difficulty getting published. Finally, Bloomsburry Press agreed to publish it but only published 500 copies for fear they wouldn't sell. They also requested she use initials so she wouldn't be recognized as a female writer. She has no middle name, so she chose the letter K for Kathleen.

8      Before The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown was a pop singer and song writer. His second solo album was titled, Angels and Demons.

9      Sidney Sheldon didn't start writing novels until he was in his fifties. Before then he was creating television hit shows like I Dream of Jeannie and The Patty Duke Show.

10   The largest book in the world is "The Klencke Atlas" at 1.75 meters tall (about 5 feet 9 inches) and 1.90 meters wide (about 6 feet 3 inches when open).

11   The longest novel available to read is Marienbad My Love by Mark Leach at 17 million words. You can actually read this novel by going to Marienbadmylove.com

12   The most expensive book is The Task by Tomas Alexander Hartmann. It has a value by the author for 153 million euros. That's about 213 million U.S. dollars. And the kicker, it's only 13 pages long.

13   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.

14   Interestingly, William Shakespeare invented the word "hurry."

15   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. 

16   Charles Dickens had to be facing north before he could write a word. 

17   For the last 12 years of his life, Casanova was a librarian. 

18   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. 

19   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 90 kph, 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. 

20   When digital looks real good: The Buddhist Bible was originally engraved on 729 white marble tablets. These tablets are regarded by Myanmar Buddhists as orthodox texts. The tablets are kept in a square, each protected by its own temple. Each marble tablet is about 3 inches wide and 4 inches long. Try to carry that around in your bag.

21   Bigass Library: The Library of Congress (Washington DC) contains 28 million books and has more than 500 miles of shelving. It would take you eight hours to pass every single book, if you were driving in a car at 70 mph. I’d hate to be the one in charge of dusting.

22   Everyone loves a good mystery: Who’s the bestselling commercial fiction author of all time? Not Meyer. Not Rowling. Not even King. No, the bestselling author of all time is Agatha Christie. Since 1920 her books have sold over a billion copies in the English language, and another billion in more than 45 other languages. She is outsold only by the Bible and William Shakespeare.

23   How much is that book? If you think today’s book prices are retarded, consider this: An original copy of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales sold for a record 7.4 million (in US dollars) at Christies in London in 1998. The book was printed in 1477 though, so unless you plan on living another 500 or so years, you’re not likely to see a royalty from that kind of sale.

24    But are they good? We like to toss around the term “prolific” when a writer publishes more than say, two books a year. Honey, you don’t know prolific. Between 1986 and 1996, Brazilian author Jose Carlos Ryoki de Alpoim Inoue published 1,058 novels in the western, science fiction and thriller genres. But are they any good?

25   And also, about Shakespeare…: Shakespeare makes Lear, whose character was an early Anglo-Saxon King, mention spectacles. In Macbeth, who dies in 1054, and when writing of King John's reign in 1200, Shakespeare mentions cannons. In Julius Caesar, he has a clock striking three. What’s wrong with these things? Spectacles, cannons and clocks were not invented until the fourteenth century, long after the times in which he set these tales. The lesson here: Research IS necessary.

26   Catherine is considered to be the saddest character ever in the history of English literature.