Books

Books

Interesting Facts

The first book bought on Amazon was called Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought.

Seventeen of the top 100 Kindle books in 2012 were self-published. This number gets higher each year.

It is predicted that within three years, 75% of books will be sold online and only 25% in brick and mortar bookstores.

The most expensive printed book in the world is the 1640 Bay Psalm book from America. It sold in November 2013 for $14.2 million.

A ‘bouquinist’ is a dealer in ‘second-hand books of little value’.

The first book printed in Oxford was a study of the Apostles’ Creed. Its first page carried a misprint: it was dated 1468 rather than 1478.
The first printed books didn’t have the name of the author or even the title printed on the covers. The covers were artworks itself, covered in drawings, leather or even gold.

The longest sentence ever printed is found in Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables. It is 823 words long.

Word “Cyberspace” originally came from Neuromancer, written by William Gibson in 1984.

Speaking of unbelievable word origins, the term Yahoo actually comes from Gulliver’s Travels, published in 1726.

In the sixteenth century, primers or learning books for children were known as ‘hornbooks’.

At high school, J. D. Salinger was so fond of acting that he signed the yearbook with the names of the roles he’d performed.

Geoffrey Chaucer’s ‘Treatise on the Astrolabe’ is possibly the first children’s science book written in English – he wrote it for his son. (More facts about Chaucer here.)

The earliest known written instance of the word ‘book’ is in a book by Alfred the Great.

‘Bibliosmia‘ is the enjoyment of the smell of old books.

Another word for a plagiarist is a ‘brain-sucker’; the word’s first recorded appearance in print (in 1781) was in reference to booksellers.

‘Incunabula’ means something in its early stages, especially any book printed before 1500; it comes from the Latin for ‘swaddling-clothes’.

Ford Madox Ford recommended that readers judge a new book, not by its first page, but by its 99th, the better to gauge the book’s quality.

In 2007, Stephen King was mistaken for a vandal when he started signing books during an unannounced visit to a bookshop in Australia. (More Stephen King facts here.)

Around £2.2 billion is spent on books in the UK each year. A fifth of this is spent on children’s books.
Books used to be chained to shelves in libraries, in order to prevent stealing.

The first book that was written using the typewriter was The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.

The real Alice in Wonderland, was named Alice Lindell. Her family was friends with the author and he penned the story for her when she was 10.

People in Iceland read more books per capita than in any other country.

Former American president, Theodore Roosevelt, read an average of one book per day.

The oldest Cookbook in the world, clay Babylonian tablet, is inscribed in Akkadian. It dates back to 1750 BC (the time of Hammurabi) and contains the oldest known cooking recipes.

Top 3 most read books in the world are: The Holy Bible, Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung and Harry Potter.

The world’s most expensive book ever purchased was bought by Bill Gates for $30.8 million. It was Codex Leicester by Leonardo Da Vinci.

The worldwide phenomenon and bestseller E.L. James’ 50 Shades of Grey was first published on a fan website.

According to one estimate, J. R. R. Tolkien is the author of the second and third biggest-selling novels in the world.

 "Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read" (Groucho Marx).

People in India are the world's biggest readers, spending an average 10.7 hours a week.

The first novel written on a typewriter is said to be Mark Twain's Adventures Of Tom Sawyer.

As well as being a real species of scorpion, a ‘book scorpion’ is someone who is hostile to books or learning; the phrase is first recorded in 1649 in a work by poet Andrew Marvell.

In order to feel close to it, Joan Didion often sleeps in the same room as the book she is working on.

The smallest book in the Welsh National Library is Old King Cole. It measures 1mm x 1mm and the pages can only be turned with a needle.

The first person Ray Bradbury asked out was a bookstore clerk; they married in 1947 and were together until her death in 2003.

 The Harry Potter books are said to be the most banned in America because of religious complaints.

 The slowest-selling book is reputedly a 1716 translation of the New Testament from Coptic into Latin. The last of its 500 copies was sold in 1907.

The Japanese word ‘tsundoku’ means ‘buying a load of books and then not getting round to reading them’. (More interesting word facts here.)

The most expensive book in the world costs (in theory) 153 million Euros and is only 13 pages long.

The word ‘shrine’ comes from the Latin scrinium meaning ‘chest for books’.

The word ‘boghandler’ is the Danish word for ‘bookseller’.

The Norwegian translation of the Mr Men book Mr Bump is called Herr Dumpidump. (More facts about children’s books here.)

Only 2% of the 1.2 million different books sold in the US in 2004 sold more than 5,000 copies.

 The M6 toll road was built on two-and-a-half million copies of pulped Mills & Boon novels.

 The first book described as a "best-seller" was Fools Of Nature by US writer Alice Brown in 1889.

 The record for most people balancing books on their heads at the same place and time is 998 in Sydney, Australia, in 2012.

 Around 150,000 new books are published in the UK each year.

 One in five adults around the world cannot read or write, with the highest rates in South and West Asia and sub-Saharan Africa.

SF writer Isaac Asimov (1920-1992) is the only author to have published a book in nine out of the ten Dewey library categories.

When asked what book he’d like to have with him on a desert island, G. K. Chesterton replied, ‘Thomas’s Guide to Practical Shipbuilding.’

Hugh Lofting, author of Dr Doolittle, thought books should have a ‘senile’ category to complement the ‘juvenile’ section.

Dickens’s house had a secret door in the form of a fake bookcase. The fake books included titles such as ‘The Life of a Cat’ in 9 volumes.

Playwright Joe Orton went to prison in 1962 for defacing library books. One of the cartoons he drew shows an elderly tattooed man in trunks.