Collection of Insane and Fun Facts
In 1895, UK prime minister William Gladstone founded a public library. Aged 85, he wheelbarrowed his personal collection of 32,000 books the ¾ mile between his home and the library. His desire, his daughter said, was to “bring together books who had no readers with readers who had no books”.
A writer was caught for a murder only after a detective read his book about a fictional murder which contained similarities and details to the real life murder that only the killer would know about. Authorities also learned he was also planning to commit another murder to write book about.
In the late 1700s and 1800s, there was widespread panic about the evils of book-reading, which was described as “an outrage on decency and common sense”. People were concerned that avid novel-readers were ‘addicted’ and were becoming anti-social.
There is such an expansive collection of books under the British library in their archive, that if a person could read 5 books per day it would take the 80,000 years to complete.
There is a book titled “Everything Men Know About Women” by Alan Francis It is filled with over 100 blank pages and has sold over 1 million copies.
The smell given off by books can be used to tell the age of the books, and how close the books are to degradation.
In Iceland books are exchanged on Christmas Eve and you spend the rest of the night reading. Iceland publishes more books per capita than any other country; & new books are typically published only during the Christmas season. This frenzy is called Jólabókaflóð, or “Christmas Book Flood.”
The alternative history novel “The Man in the High Castle” features a “novel within a novel”. While the actual book is about Nazis winning WWII, the in-book novel is about an alternate universe in which the Nazis lose the war.
Dr. Seuss’ first publication was a book entitled The Pocket Book of Boners.
When Huckleberry Finn was first published, it was banned not for being racist as it is many times today, but for NOT being racist. It showed the friendship between a black man and a white boy.