1. The origin of the Latin word for book, liber, comes from the Romans
who used the thin layer found between the bark and the wood (the liber) before
the times of parchment. The English word comes from the Danish word for book,
bog, meaning birch tree, as the early people of Denmark wrote on birch bark.
2.
The Holy Bible
is the biggest selling book of all time.
3.
The oldest
printed book in the World is believed to be "The Diamond Sutra" which
bears the date 868 AD.
4.
Britains most
expensive book is Skakespeare's First Folio which sold at auction for £2.8
million.
5.
JK Rowling's
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is the fastest-selling book ever.
6.
The smallest
book in the World is a leather bound volume which measures 2.4mm by 2.9mm
and has a letter of the alphabet on each page.
7. Book sales in the UK topped over £1 billion in 2007.
8. 1. One out of every eight letters you read is the letter ‘e’.
9. 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.
10.3. There have been over 20,000 books written about the game of Chess.
11.4. 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.
12.5. 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, "!"
13.6. 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.
14.7. Interestingly, William Shakespeare invented the word
"hurry."
15.8. And speaking of Shakespeare, can you imagine John Wayne reciting
Shakespeare? Well, he did one time, and won a Shakespeare contest.
16.9. 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.
17.10. In America, we buy 57 books per second. It would take a shelf 78
miles long to hold all of one day's books.
18.11. 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.
19.12. The Bible contains 3,566,480 letters, or 810,697 words.
20.13. 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.
21.14. Americans buy approximately five million books a day. 125 new titles
are published every day.
22.15. The first published book ever written on a typewriter was The
Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Mark Twain used a Remington in 1875.
23.16. It took Noah Webster 36 years to write his first dictionary.
24.17. 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.
25.18. 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.
26.19. For the last 12 years of his life, Casanova was a librarian.
27.20. Charles Dickens had to be facing north before he could write a word.
28.21. There are 72,466,926 books in the Library of Congress on 327 miles
of bookshelves.
29.
You probably wonder what was the first printed book in the
world. Well, this a quite tricky business since we should first establish what
we understand by “printed”. As besides the modern printing methods even the
first ways of transferring words or symbols to paper, clay and other materials
can also be considered as printing that dates for thousands of years. Based on
this and on different evidences, many people say that it is impossible to
clearly state what was the first printed book in the world. However,
authorities tend to give the credit to the Gutenberg Bible. On the other hand,
there is also the possibility of giving the title to a certain book in Asia.
1. The largest
book in the world is "The Klencke Atlas” with 1,75 meters long and 1,90
meters wide. It is so heavy as it needs six persons to lift it and other two to
open it. Johan Maurits of Nassau made The Klencke Atlas, which Amsterdam
merchant Johannes Klencke apparently presented to Charles II of England upon
the king's restoration to the throne in 1660. The book is a collection of 37
printed wall maps encapsulating all the geographic and historical knowledge of
the time. All the maps are either unique or one of only a few copies.
2. • One-third of high school graduates never read another book for the
rest of their lives.
3. • 42 percent of college graduates never read another book after
college.
4. • 80 percent of U.S. families did not buy or read a book last year.
5. • 70 percent of U.S. adults have not been in a bookstore in the last
five years.
6. • 57 percent of new books are not read to completion.
7.
8.
10.--brought to you by mental_floss!
Over 50% of NASA employees are dyslexic. They are deliberately
sought after because they have superb problem solving skills and excellent 3D
and spatial awareness.
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Dyslexia affects one out of every five
children - ten million in America alone
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44 million adults in the U.S. can't read
well enough to read a simple story to a child.
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t is estimated that the cost of illiteracy
to business and the taxpayer is $20 billion per year.
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