Boarding House Blues

Fun Facts to Start the Year

1 January 2024

I like to think of January 1 as the first page in a new book. A book that I have 365 days to fill with facts, trivia, jokes, new experiences, and random thoughts. Here is some trivia to start your year.

  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. In fact, avid reading throughout a lifetime may reduce the rate of memory decline by as much as 32%.
  4. The Japanese word ‘tsundoku’ means ‘buying a load of books and then not getting round to reading them’.
  5. In Brazilian prisons, reading a book can reduce a prisoner's sentence by four days.
  6. Virginia Woolf wrote all her books while standing. .R.R. Tolkien, on the other hand, typed the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy with two fingers.
  7. The most stolen book is the Bible. It is also the best-selling book of all time, with over 5-7 billion copies sold, followed by The Quran (3 billion), The Little Red Book: Quotations from Chairman Mao (900 million), and Don Quixote (500 million). Close to 400 million Harry Potter books have been sold.
  8. Roosevelt read an average of one book per day.
  9. There are over 20,000 books written about chess.
  10. Victor Hugo’s "Les Misérables" contains a sentence with 823 words, 93 commas, 51 semicolons, and 4 dashes.
  11. Thirty-three percent (33%) of high school graduates in the U.S. never read another book for the rest of their lives. It is also estimated that 1 in 5 adults worldwide cannot read or write.
  12. Words like "hurry" and "addiction" were invented by Shakespeare.
  13. The most expensive book in the world is Codex Leicester by Leonardo Da Vinci. Bill Gates purchased the book for $30.8 million dollars in 1994 (equivalent to $63.3 million today). The Book of Mormon sold for $35 million in 2017 ($43.5 million today).
  14. If all the books in the New York Public Library were lined up, they would stretch 8 miles.
  15. Leo Tolstoy's wife hand-copied the manuscript of "War and Peace" seven times.
  16. Noah Webster took 36 years to write his first dictionary.
  17. Remembrance of Things Past is the longest book in the world, with 9,609,000 characters
  18. Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain is said to be the first novel written on a typewriter.
  19. Charles Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol in six weeks.
  20. There is a word for the act of smelling books ‘bibliosmia’ and it’s actually pretty common. 'Abibliophobia' is the fear of running out of reading material.
  21. Harry Potter books have been translated into 71 languages. In the French edition, Tom Marvolo Riddle's (aka Voldemort) middle name is Elvis. The change was necessary so that his full name – Tom Elvis Jedusor – would become an anagram of “je suis Voldemort”. His middle names became Servolo in Brazilian Portuguese, Vandrolo in Hebrew, Marvoldo in Turkish, Vorlost in German, Marvoloso in Slovak, and Orvoloson in Italian.
  22. It is estimated that over 900,000 new books are published each year. On average
  23. Two and a half million copies of Mills and Boon (British publisher) novels were pulped and used to build part of the M6 toll road (26 miles/6 lanes) in Birmingham, England. They were used in the top layer of the motorway.

 

linkedin facebook pinterest youtube rss twitter instagram facebook-blank rss-blank linkedin-blank pinterest youtube twitter instagram