12 interesting facts about books

12-facts-about-books-and-authors

  1. The first published book written on a typewriter The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain.  He used a Remington in 1875.
  2. One out of every eight letters in a book is the letter “e”
  3. In 1939 an author named Ernest Vincent wrote a 50,000 word novel called Gadsby.  What’s so unusual? Well, there isn’t a single letter “e” in the entire book.
  4. The book, Les Miserables by Victor Hugo, contains one sentence that is 823 words long. When Hugo wrote to his editor inquiring about their opinion of the manuscript, he wrote, "?" and they responded with, "!"
  5. 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.
  6. William Shakespeare invented the word hurry, along with boredom, disgraceful, hostile, money's worth, obscene, puke, perplex, on purpose, shooting star, and sneak.  Until his time, people had to have their conversations without these words…could you imagine? What would have Elton John and Bob Dylan named their famous songs?
  7. Leo Tolstoy wrote his lengthy book War and Peace before computers and copying machines. His wife had to copy his manuscript by hand seven times.
  8. It took Noah Webster 36 years to write his first dictionary.
  9. 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 one hundred years before they were described by astronomers.
  10. For the last 12 years of his life, Casanova was a librarian.
  11. Charles Dickens had to be facing north before he could write a word.
  12. There are 72,466,926 books in the Library of Congress on 327 miles of bookshelves.

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