Children and adults alike are coming together to celebrate reading and share stories this World Book Day on 7th March. Get involved by reading up on these fascinating facts about books.
1. You'll need time for these tomes
According to the Guinness Book of World Records, the longest novel ever is A la recherche du temps perdu by Marcel Proust.
The first volume of the epic work, which was published in 13 volumes, was written in 1912. It contains an estimated 9,609,000 characters and nearly 1.3 million words!
If you're more impressed by size than length, the largest book in the world is The Klencke Atlas. It’s 1.75 meters tall and nearly two metres wide when you open it.
If you can open it!
2. Pulped fiction
It might seem to you like an unexpected plot twist, but part of the M6 toll road is actually built on old copies of romance novels. 2.5 million of the books were shredded and mixed into the road's surface.
According to building materials suppliers Tarmac, the pulped books works to hold the materials in place and also helps to absorb sound, due to the books' absorbent qualities.
Said Richard Beal, the company's project manager for the road: "They may be slushy to many people, but it's their 'no-slushiness' that is their attraction as far as we are concerned."
3. A story to make your skin crawl
Scientists believe that Harvard University owns a book that is bound in human skin.
The book, Des destinees de l'ame (Destinies of the Soul), is said to have been given by writer Arsene Houssaye to his friend Dr Ludovic Bouland, who later purportedly bound the book in the skin of an unclaimed female patient who had died of natural causes.
It might seem macabre, but there are reports that anthropodermic bibliopegy, the binding of books in human skin, has existed since the 16th Century.
According to several 19th Century accounts, when the bodies of executed criminals were donated to science, their skins were later given to bookbinders.
4. Stay true to your shelf
Which type of book reader are you?
The Japanese word tsundoku has no equivalent in English, and is translated by Oxford Dictionaries as ‘the act of leaving a book unread after buying it, typically piling it up together with other such unread books.’ We've all been there.
Or are you a biblioklept? These are people who accidentally steal books by borrowing and forgetting to return them.
Or perhaps you're simply a librocubicularist? According to Oxford Dictionaries, this is a slang word amongst literary circles that describes people who read in bed - created by combining the Latin for book, liber, and sleeping chamber, cubiculum.
5. Take a page out of his book
Although we started with the longest book, sometimes less is more.
One of the world's best-selling children's authors, Theodor Seuss Geisel, aka Dr. Seuss, has sold over 650 million books worldwide.
The Cat in the Hat contains just 236 words, and you might be surprised to find that Green Eggs and Ham is made up of just 50.
It's said that the latter was a result of a bet in 1960 with Seuss’s publisher at Random House. Bennett Cerf bet Seuss $50 that he couldn’t write a book using 50 words or fewer - and Seuss won the bet!
Enjoyed these?
For more fun facts on books, join us on World Book Day, 7th March, at 2pm for a World Book Day Live Lesson and get up close and personal with well-known children's authors Malorie Blackman, Rob Biddulph and Cressida Cowell.