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50 Wild, Surprising Facts About Books & Reading

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1. The world's oldest known library, the Library of Ashurbanipal in Nineveh, held clay tablets dating back to the 7th century BC.
2. The Gutenberg Bible, printed around 1455, was among the first major books produced using movable type in Europe.
3. The longest novel ever published, Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time, runs to roughly 1.2 million words.
4. The word 'bibliophile' combines Greek roots meaning 'book' and 'friend' or 'lover.'
5. Agatha Christie is the best-selling novelist of all time, with sales estimated in the billions across all languages combined.
6. The Voynich Manuscript, an illustrated codex from the 15th century, remains undeciphered to this day.
7. A 'incunabula' is any book printed in Europe before the year 1501, during printing's earliest infancy.
8. The Library of Congress holds more than 170 million items across its collections, making it one of the largest libraries in the world.
9. Don Quixote, published in two parts in 1605 and 1615, is often cited as the first modern novel.
10. The Dewey Decimal System, still used in many libraries today, was created by Melvil Dewey in 1876.
11. Some medieval books were chained to library shelves or desks to prevent theft, a practice known as chained libraries.
12. The first e-reader, the Sony Data Discman, was released in 1990, more than a decade before the Kindle.
13. J.R.R. Tolkien invented several fully functioning languages, including Elvish, before writing much of The Lord of the Rings.
14. The term 'paperback' didn't become common until the 1930s, when Penguin Books popularized affordable softcover fiction.
15. Beatrix Potter self-published The Tale of Peter Rabbit in 1901 after publishers repeatedly rejected it.
16. A first-edition copy of Shakespeare's First Folio has sold at auction for well over $9 million.
17. The word 'plot' in a literary sense originally referred to a plan or map, before it described a story's structure.
18. Ray Bradbury wrote much of Fahrenheit 451 on rented typewriters in a library basement, paying by the hour.
19. The Codex Sinaiticus, one of the oldest surviving Bibles, dates to the 4th century AD.
20. Jane Austen published her novels anonymously during her lifetime, credited only as 'A Lady.'
21. The Bodleian Library at Oxford has a policy dating to 1610 that no reader may remove a book from its walls.
22. The longest-running literary award still active today, the Newbery Medal, was first given in 1922.
23. A 'colophon' is the publisher's identifying emblem or note, often printed at the end of older books.
24. Herman Melville's Moby-Dick sold poorly during his lifetime and only gained major recognition decades after his death.
25. The Ambleside branch of the world's smallest public library reportedly measures barely larger than a phone booth.
26. George Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm were both initially rejected by multiple publishers before finding a home.
27. The word 'novel' comes from the Italian 'novella,' meaning a new or short story.
28. Braille, the tactile reading system, was developed by Louis Braille when he was only 15 years old.
29. The largest book ever physically produced, a bound edition of Bhutanese photographs, weighs over 130 pounds.
30. Charles Dickens originally published many of his novels in serialized magazine installments before they became complete books.
31. The term 'bestseller' as a sales category first appeared in American publishing around the 1890s.
32. Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein when she was just 18 years old, as part of a ghost-story writing challenge.
33. The Rosetta Stone, key to deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs, contains the same decree written in three different scripts.
34. Some libraries in ancient Rome had separate sections for Greek and Latin texts, an early form of collection organization.
35. The world's most translated book is the Bible, with portions translated into more than 3,000 languages.
36. Lewis Carroll was a pen name; the author of Alice in Wonderland was mathematician Charles Lutwidge Dodgson.
37. The first novel written on a typewriter is widely believed to be Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi.
38. A 'palimpsest' is a manuscript page reused by scraping off earlier writing, sometimes revealing lost ancient texts under UV light.
39. Public library systems in the U.S. collectively circulate well over a billion physical items every year.
40. The Harry Potter series has been translated into more than 80 languages, from Latin to Scots Gaelic.
41. Early printed books often lacked page numbers entirely, a convention that only became standard over time.
42. The Diamond Sutra, printed in 868 AD, is considered the oldest dated printed book in the world.
43. Toni Morrison worked full-time as a book editor for years, championing other Black authors before her own novels found wide fame.
44. The phrase 'graphic novel' was popularized in large part by Will Eisner's 1978 work A Contract with God.
45. Many university libraries maintain a 'closed stacks' system where rare books are stored securely and retrieved only on request.
46. The word 'library' derives from the Latin 'liber,' meaning both 'book' and, separately, 'free.'
47. Stephen King's first novel, Carrie, was famously rescued from the trash by his wife after he initially discarded the manuscript.
48. The oldest surviving complete printed book, the Diamond Sutra, was found sealed in a cave in China in the early 20th century.
49. A single large public library system can hold cataloged records for several million distinct titles across all formats.
50. The children's book Goodnight Moon was initially left off some library recommended lists over concerns about its simplicity.