Monday, June 24, 2013

Interesting Facts About Authors

I recently came upon Lena Sledge's Blog and wanted to share part of her Monday, December 12, 2011 post with you. You might be as fascinated as I was!


Here Are Some Interesting Facts About Authors:


  • In the book, Les Miserable by Victor Hugo there is one sentence that is 823 words long.
  • In the United States, people buy an average of 57 books per second.
  • It took Noah Webster thirty-six years to write his first dictionary.
  • One out of every eight letters you read is the letter 'e'.
  • Gadsby was written by Ernest Vincent Wright in 1939. The 50,000 word novel doesn't contain the letter 'e'.
  • J.K. Rowling had difficulty getting published. Finally, Bloomsburry Press agreed to publish it but only published 500 copies for fear they wouldn't sell. They also requested she use initials so she wouldn't be recognized as a female writer. She has no middle name, so she chose the letter K for Kathleen.
  • Before The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown was a pop singer and song writer. His second solo album was titled, Angels and Demons.
  • Sidney Sheldon didn't start writing novels until he was in his fifties. Before then he was creating television hit shows like I Dream of Jeannie and The Patty Duke Show.
  • The largest book in the world is "The Klencke Atlas" at 1.75 meters tall (about 5 feet 9 inches) and 1.90 meters wide (about 6 feet 3 inches when open).
  • The world's most expensive book ever purchased was bought by Bill Gates at auction for $30.8 million dollars. The title of the book is Codex Leicester by Leonard da Vinci.
  • The longest novel available to read is Marienbad My Love by Mark Leach at 17 million words. You can actually read this novel by going to Marienbadmylove.com
  • The most expensive book is The Task by Tomas Alexander Hartmann. It has a value by the author for 153 million euros. That's about 213 million U.S. dollars. And the kicker, it's only 13 pages long.

Have you got any interesting facts to share with us? Please share them!

4 comments:

  1. Seventeen million words? I couldn't write that many in my entire lifetime!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Alex: Pretty wild, eh? I found these challenging.

    ReplyDelete
  3. The one that intrigued me the most was about the letter E. The whole novel, without an E?!
    How did Wright DO that?!!
    (ha ha, I had trouble making that tiny last sentence without using an E!)

    ReplyDelete
  4. Rettakat: It's doubly hard to create a story when doing something like leaving out some item of importance. But to leave out a crucial vowel; it must have been a real headache. It makes my head hurt just thinking about it!

    ReplyDelete