Book Facts

 Here are some interesting facts about books from CBC:

1. Harvard University Library has four books bound in human skin.

2. Iceland tops the world in per capita book reading.

3. People who read books are less likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease.

4. In Brazilian prisons, reading a book can reduce a prisoner's sentence by four days.

5. Virginia Woolf wrote all her books while standing.

6. The most stolen book is the Bible.

7. Roosevelt read an average of one book per day.

8. There are over 20,000 books written about chess.

9. Victor Hugo’s "Les Misérables" contains a sentence with 823 words.

10. Words like "hurry" and "addiction" were invented by Shakespeare.

11. If all the books in the New York Public Library were lined up, they would stretch 8 miles.

12. Leo Tolstoy's wife hand-copied the manuscript of "War and Peace" seven times.

13. Noah Webster took 36 years to write his first dictionary.

14. The Mahabharata is the only book or epic in the world with over 1,200 characters.

Books enable me to see the world in general with new eyes and critique hitherto taken for granted norms prevalent in society. They also serve as a microcosm of the world around us.

When my confidence soars too high, I open a book to ground myself. Guess it works both ways.

- The first book ever written was "The Epic of Gilgamesh" around 2500 BC.

- The longest book in the world is "Remembrance of Things Past" by Marcel Proust with 1.26 million words.

- The most expensive book ever sold is the "Codex Leicester" by Leonardo da Vinci for $30.8 million.

- The most translated book in the world is the Bible.

- The first e-book was created in 1971 by Project Gutenberg.

- The most borrowed book in libraries is "The Da Vinci Code" by Dan Brown.

- The longest novel ever written is "Artamène ou le Grand Cyrus" with 13095 pages.

- The most popular book genre is romance.

- The average book takes 475 hours to write

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