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.
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