• “Go,” is the shortest complete sentence in the English language.
  • For several decades the well-known Belgian mystery writer Georges Simenon wrote, on the average, one Novel every eleven days. Besides the more than 230 Novels he penned under his own name, Simenon wrote 300 other books under a pseudonym.
  • The origin of the Latin word for book, liber, comes from the Romans who used the thin layer found between the bark and the wood (the liber) before the times of parchment. The English word comes from the Danish word for book, bog, meaning birch tree, as the early people of Denmark wrote on birch bark.
  • An original copy of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales sold for a record £4,621,500 (9 times the expected price) at Christies, London, UK on 8th July 1998 by a private collector. The book was the first major work printed in England by William Caxton, in 1477.
  • The Nursery Rhyme “Old King Cole” is based on a real king and a real historical event. King Cole is supposed to have been an actual monarch of Britain who ruled around 200 A.D.
  • The Library of Congress, Washington DC, USA contains 28 million books and has 532 miles of shelving. If you were driving at a constant 70 mph in a car it would take you just under 8 hours to pass them all. And thats without stopping to go to the toilet!
  • Johannes Gutenberg was not the first man to produce a book printed with movable type. Printed books were made in China five hundred years before their appearance in Europe. These books were set in movable type made with metal or porcelain characters, were printed on paper (which also was invented in China centuries before it reached the West), and were bound in a manner much like contemporary volumes, complete with title page and cover.
  • Between 1986 and 1996, Brazilian author Jose Carlos Ryoki de Alpoim Inoue had a massive 1,058 novels published. He writes westerns, science fiction and thrillers. Does he ever eat?
  • The sentence “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog”, uses every letter in the alphabet.
  • A 15 letter word that can be spelled without repeating a letter is uncopyrightable.
  • The Main Library at Indiana University sinks over an inch every year by the weight of books.
  • The dot over the letter “i” is called a tittle.
  • There are no words in the dictionary that rhyme with orange, purple and silver.
  • On average, 100 people choke to death on ballpoint pens every year.