I love trivia...true confession. When it came to playing Trivial Pursuit, I was a champ (as long as I could stay away from the sports category!) Btw, does anyone still play Trivial Pursuit? Anyway, today, I thought I would bring you some book facts that you might not know--- I didn't until I started looking them up.
1. According to The Guiness Book of World Records, the longest novel is A la recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past) by Marcel Proust. Thirteen volumes. There are some people who squabble a bit about this (have you seen the lengths of some pieces of fanfic?), but according to The Book, this is the longest.
2. The largest book is This the Prophet Mohamed. It's 16.40 feet x 26.44 feet, weighs 3,306 punds, and consists of 429 pages. Not a book that you want to take to bed with you.
3. However, the largest published book is anedition of The Little Prince measuring 6 feet 7 inches high and 10 feet 1 inch wide when open and contains 128 pages. Not such a little prince.
4. The most expensive book that was ever sold at auction was the first book ever printed in British North America, Bay Psalm Book. Only 11 copies remain from the original 1700 print run. One of those eleven recently sold for $14,165,000. Do you have any old books in your attic? Who knows what you might find.
5. As you know, I love my autographed books. The record held by a single author for the most books signed in a single session is held by Vickrant Mahajan - 6,904 copies! I bet he had writer's cramp after that!
6. You and I only THNK we own a lot of books. We are all rank amateurs compared to John Q. Benham, who holds the title for the largest number of privately owned book. Over 1.5 million! Share THAT with the next person to tell you that you have too many books!
7. Finally, the dubious honor of having the slowest selling book belongs to David Wilkins' translation of the New Testament from Coptic into Latin, published by Oxford University Press (OUP) in 1716. Five hundred copies were originally made and it remained in print for 191 years, selling an average of one book every 20 weeks.
Wow, I can't even imagine what it would be like to read a book that was 26 feet long. One must have needed help from at least a few other people to turn the pages.
ReplyDeleteMy Saturday Seven post for this week: http://lydiaschoch.com/saturday-seven-humorous-book-titles/
Holy HOly!! that's a lot of book facts> Well done.
ReplyDelete1.5 million books? The question is... has he read them?
ReplyDeleteJudging by the lack of floor space in my house, I doubt I could amass a fraction of that person's library, lol. Thanks for the fun facts...and I used to be a fairly good guesser at Trivial Pursuit, much to my friends' dismay!
ReplyDeleteMy post is here: https://thereadingaddict-elf.blogspot.com/2018/04/saturday-seven-fantasy-series.html