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Ernest Vincent
wrote a book in 1939 called “Gadsby.” The novel itself is not
unusual, except that in the entire thing, there is not only
letter “e.”
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There seems to be
a lot to say about the game of chess, as over twenty thousand
books have been written on the subject.
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The longest
sentence in the book “Les Miserables” by Victor Hugo is 823
words long. After Hugo’s editor had read the manuscript, Hugo
sent a letter that only said “?” to find out what they thought.
They sent the manuscript back with the response “!”
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If you were to
place all of the shelves in the New York Public Library side by
side, they would be eighty miles long. The most commonly checked
out books are about astrology, drugs, witchcraft, and
Shakespeare.
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William
Shakespeare invented the words: hurry, boredom, disgraceful,
hostile, money’s worth, obscene, puke, perplex, on purpose,
shooting star, and sneak. Hard to imagine that before his time,
people had to have conversations without saying these words.
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John Wayne once
recited Shakespeare and ended up winning a Shakespeare contest.
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Americans
collectively buy fifty-seven books every second. For a shelf to
hold a day’s worth of books, it would need to extend
seventy-eight miles long.
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Collectively
Americans buy approximately five million books a day. So how do
they make sure there is always enough for everyone to read?
There are 125 new titles published every day.
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The number of
Bibles ever made exceeds two and a half billion. If one were to
put them on a shelf and drive along the shelf at 55mph for forty
hours a week, it would take over four months before one reached
the end. All of the Bibles ever made would fill up the New York
Public Library 467 ½ times.
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The Bible in its
entirety totals 3,566,480 letters for a total of 810,697 words.
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Leo Tolstoy wrote
“War and Peace” before computers or word processing software was
ever even imagined. His wife edited the thick manuscript. Not
just once though and not just twice. She leafed through the book
seven times to get it perfect.
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“The Webster
Dictionary” took Noah Webster thirty-six years to complete the
first edition.
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In the book
“Gulliver’s Travels”, Jonathan Swift talks about two moons that
orbit the planet Mars. He did this long before science fiction
was called science fiction and definitely before anyone had
completed any studies on Mars. One hundred years later,
astronomers identified those two moons.
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A. Conan Doyle,
the man responsible for writing the famous Sherlock Holmes
mysteries, was actually an eye doctor. Because in that day being
an eye doctor didn’t pay enough for him to make a decent living,
he wrote in his spare time to supplement his income.
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Every writer has
their own little quirks that they need to write. Charles Dickens
always had to be facing north.
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The number of
books in the Library of Congress equals 72,466,926. If you
placed all of the bookshelves that held them side-by-side they
would measure 327 miles.
