April 23 - International Book Day
For tomorrow's holiday, we've prepared some interesting facts about books for you.
✝️The best-selling book is the Bible. There are 5 billion printed copies worldwide.
📏The longest book in the world is "Memories of the Past". It has 9,609,000 characters, including spaces. It was written by Marcel Proust from France in 1912.
💲The most expensive book in the world is The Leicester Codex, the scientific diary of Leonardo da Vinci. In 1994, the scientific book was sold for $30.8 million to Bill Gates.
📜The first story written was "The Epic of Gilgamesh". The story was written in 2100 BC in cuneiform, which is one of the oldest forms of writing.
📚The largest collection consists of 1.5 million books!They belong to John K. Benham, who lives in Indiana, USA.
He has to keep them in different places because he doesn't have enough space in the house.They are in the garage, in his two-storey building and even on the street!
⏳If you read for 20 minutes a day, you would read 1.8 million words in a year.
🤫There are four law books bound in human skin in the Harvard University Library.
😔Every fifth adult in the world cannot read or write.
🌳Up to 50 books can be made from 1 tree.
There is a real word for the love of the smell of old books — Bibliosmia.
🏥The author of Peter Pan, J. M. Barry, has transferred the rights to this book to Great Ormond Street Hospital. The granting of rights to this hospital has helped fund it and provide a steady income to benefit the many lives the hospital saves.
™️Previously, the names of authors were not printed on the covers of their books.
The covers of the first printed books were considered works of art. They were covered with drawings, leather and even gold — so there was no place for the author's name.
🕊️Victor Hugo wrote the longest sentence ever printed in the novel Les Miserables. A total of 823 words in one sentence.
🇮🇸People from Iceland read more than anyone else.A study conducted at Bifrest University showed that 50% of Icelanders read more than 8 books a year, and 93% read at least one.
🥇Hugh Beaver (manager of Guinness Breweries) was the founder of the Guinness Book of Records. In the 1950s, he went hunting in County Wexford, where he missed a golden plover. He claimed that it was the fastest hunting bird in Europe, but could not find a reference book confirming this. That's why Hugh Beaver created the Guinness Book of Records.
📼 The longest audiobook in the world, published in 2008, lasts almost five days.
The audiobook consists of lectures by Takaaki Yoshimoto, a philosopher, poet and literary critic from Japan. The total working time is 115 hours and 43 minutes.