| Agatha Christie is the best selling novelist of all time | Bestsellers |
| The best selling and most widely distributed book of all time is the Bible | |
| The best selling refernce book is "Xinhua Zidian," a Chinese dictionary | |
| "Don Quixote" by Migel de Cervantes is the bestselling novel of all time | |
| J.K. Rowling was the first author to make a billion dollars from book sales | |
| Shakespeare is said to have invented about 2,000 words | Words |
| "Bookworm" and "bibliophile" are 2 words used to describe book-lovers | |
| A "tsundoku" is a person who buys more books than they will ever read | |
| Some of us love the smell of old books. This is called "bibliosmia" | |
| Raymond Chandler invented the word "unputdownable" to describe a book | |
| Publishers rejected "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone" 12 times | Rejected |
| Moby Dick was rejected for being "long and old fashioned" | |
| "Irish Wine" by Dick Wimmer was rejected 162 times before it was published | |
| Beatrix Potter’s "Peter Rabbit" was rejected 6 times by publishers | |
| "First Impressions" was rejected, then published as "Pride and Prejudice" | |
| George Eliot was a woman. Her real name was Mary Ann Evans | Pseudonyms |
| Eric Blair chose the king's name and a river as his pen name: George Orwell | |
| Horror writer Stephen King also wrote under the name Richard Bachman | |
| JK Rowling published an adult novel under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith | |
| Agatha Christie published 6 romance novels as Mary Westmacott | |
| "The Catcher in the Rye" by JD Salinger is banned in some US schools | Banned |
| As is "To Kill a Mockingbird" by Harper Lee | |
| "1984" by George Orwell was banned in the USSR and some US counties | |
| Alice in Wonderland was banned in China because it includes talking animals | |
| In 1960 Penguin were taken to court for publishing "Lady Chaterley's Lover" | |
| The most expensive book cost $30.8 million! It's "Codex Leicester" by Di Vinci | Trivia |
| Victor Hugo’s "Les Miserables" contains an 823 word sentence | |
| Charles Dickens slept facing north, thinking it would improve his writing | |
| The first novel written on a typewriter was "Tom Sawyer" by Mark Twain | |
| John Steinbeck's first draught of "Of Mice and Men" was eaten by his dog | |
| The longest novel is "Remembrance of Things Past" with 9,609,000 characters | Length |
| The longest book title is made up of 3,777 words. There's no room for it here! | |
| The longest series is possibly "Guin Saga" which has over 100 volumes | |
| The shortest novel is 40,000 words. Any shorter and it would be a novella | |
| "The Dinosaur" by Augusto Monterroso is only 9 words long | |
| "Pride goes before a fall" is a misquotation from the Bible | Misquotes |
| As is "Money is the root of all evil" | |
| The Shakespeare quote "To gild the lily" is a misrepresentation of his words | |
| “Me Tarzan, You Jane” never appeared in any of the Tarzan books | |
| “Elementary, my dear Watson” never appears in the Sherlock Holmes stories | |
| David Walliams has won the Children's Book Award three times | Awards |
| Established in 1919, the James Tait Black prize is the UK's oldest book award | |
| The Costa Book Awards (the Whitbread Literary Awards) began in 1971 | |
| In 1975 there were 83 Booker Prize entries. Just 2 made it onto the shortlist | |
| The Nobel Prize for Literature has been won most often by French authors | |
| The classic "Bladerunner" is based on "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" | Adaptations |
| A poll on Goodreads voted the "Percy Jackson" series the worst adaptations | |
| 142 minute film "Shawshank Redemption" is based on a 93 page story | |
| Charles Dickens is the most adapted author of all time | |
| The Grimm Brothers' "Cinderella" is much gorier than Disney's adaptation | |
