Almanac chapter 13: Books/Authors

                                     Chapter 13

                                  BOOKS / AUTHORS

              One out of every eight letters you read is the letter e.

              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.

              Perhaps the most  uninteresting  book  ever  written  is  the
         calculation  of  pi to 2 million places, in 800 pages.  Just think
         of the TV special that could be made from this script.

              If you stretched out all the shelves in the New  York  Public
         Library  they  would  extend  80  miles.   The  books  most  often
         requested at this library are about drugs,  witchcraft,  astrology
         and Shakespeare.

              Interestingly, William Shakespeare invented the word hurry.

              And  speaking  of  Shakespeare,  can  you  imagine John Wayne
         reciting  Shakespeare?   Well,  he  did  one  time,  and   won   a
         Shakespeare contest.

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

              There  have  been 2,458,000,000 copies of the Bible made.  If
         you put them on a long bookshelf and  started  driving  along  the
         shelf  at  55  mph,  you would have to drive 40 hours per week for
         over four months to get to the end. All these  Bibles  would  fill
         the New York public library 467 and one-half times.

              The Bible contains 3,566,480 letters, 810,697 words.

              Leo  Tolstoy  wrote  a  large book called War and Peace.  His
         wife had to copy his manuscript by hand seven times.

              Americans buy approximately five million books a day. 125 new
         titles are published every day.

              The  first  book  ever  written  on  a  typewriter  was   The
         Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Mark Twain used a Remington in 1875.

              It took Noah Webster 36 years to write his first dictionary.

              Jonathan Swift wrote a classic book called Gulliver's Travels
         that  boarders  on  science fiction although it was written before
         science fiction was what you called such books.  In this  book  he
         wrote  about  two moons circling Mars. He described their size and
         speed of orbit.  He did this one hundred years  before  they  were
         described by astronomers.

              The  man  who  wrote  the  Sherlock  Holmes stories, A. Conan
         Doyle, was a professional ophthamologist, an eye doctor.

              For the last 12 years of his life, Casanova was a librarian.

              Charles Dickens had to be facing north before he could  write
         a word.

              There are 72,466,926 books in the Library of Congress.