Need Something to Say?

September 7, 2012

While frittering away my time the other day, I ran across these interesting facts about books and reading.  Since it's always nice to have something interesting to talk about, consider this list as inspiration for your next conversational lull.  Enjoy!

If you stretched out all the shelves in the New York Public Library, they would extend eighty miles. The books most often requested at this library are about drugs, witchcraft, astrology and Shakespeare.

In America, we buy 57 books per second. It would take a shelf 78 miles long to hold all of one day’s books.

The man who wrote the Sherlock Holmes stories, A. Conan Doyle, was a professional ophthalmologist, an eye doctor. Because in his time specialty medical practices were hard to build and didn’t pay well, he had to take up writing to make ends meet.

The original title for The Great Gatsy was going to be The Incident at West Egg.

Almost half of all the paperback books printed and distributed for the North  American market are romance novels of various types.

The Main Library at Indiana University sinks over an inch every year because when it was built, engineers failed to take into account the weight of all the books that would occupy the building.

The average person reads less then one book per year. After most people finish college they only read 5 books over the course of their life.

In 1939 an author named Ernest Vincent wrote a 50,000 word novel called Gadsby. The only thing unusual about the novel is that there is not a single letter ‘e’ in the whole thing.

James Patterson is the richest author. He’s had 51 New York Times best sellers and has an estimated fortune of $70million dollars.  It is also said that he writes his books by hand!