The honour of a Bibliophile, a reader’s eternal love, a mirror of mankind, a store house of knowledge, a man’s best friend, best philosopher and guide; there’s a gogo of term which comes up to relate books…

Cicero once said- “A Room without books is like a body without soul.”

The ones not reading are starving their mind, body and soul. The room is heart, mind and soul; meant to be decorated with beautiful pages of masterpieces. Glamour shines more when comes packed with knowledge; the knowledge of our past, present and future and our collective experiences. They form the foundation of conscience, bring virtue, and are a limitless journey. They never detach themselves from you and stay forever loyal. They water life with knowledge, richness of spirit immense intelligence, wit and humour. They contain articulate elucidations of things within human capacity and insights into the intellectual channel of imaginations. Here we present 17 less known facts about books on the World Book and Copyright Day today:

1. The most expensive books in the world are: Codex Leicester by Leonardo Da Vinci, at a whopping $30.8 million, bought by Bill Clinton; 1640 Bay Psalm from America, at $14.2 million in November 2013; Birds of America, by James Audubon– $11.5 million in 2010.

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2. The first book to be printed was The Gutenberg Bible and its first copy was brought to the United States by James Lenox in 1847.

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3. The first novel to be published was The Tale of Genji (11^th century) by Murasaki Shikibu, and was a masterpiece of Heian fiction.

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4. The world’s first printed atlas, and the world’s first book to make use of engraved illustrations, Claudius Ptolemy’s- Geographia Cosmographia. To take aback, it was sold at $4 million at Sotheby’s London in 2006.

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5. Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” was the first novel to be written on a typewriter. It used a Remington, in 1875.

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6. World’s largest book written on stone is at Kuthodaw Pagoda at Mandalay Hill in Myanmar. It has 730 leaves (1460 pages); each page being 107 cms wide, 153 cms tall and 13 centimetres thick. It took almost 8 years to compile the book all together, from 14^th October 1860 to 4^th May 1868.

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7. World’s largest printed book measures 5m X 8.06 m (16.40 ft X 26.44 ft) and weighs 1500 kilograms, consisting of 429 pages. It was published on 27^th February 2012 at United Arab Emirates (Dubai) by Mshahed International Group.

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8. The first declared “best-seller” was Fools of Nature by US writer Alice Brown in 1889.

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9. Phillis Wheatley was the first African American who published Book of Poetry. She was seven or eight when captured from her home in West Africa. A slave ship brought her to Boston.

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10. The smallest book written is Teeny Ted from Turnip Town by Malcolm Douglas Chaplin. Its exact measurements are 70 micrometres by 100 micrometres. It is produced for $15,000 and it’s so minuscule that it fits on a human hair.

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11. Mickey Spillane ordered 50,000 copies of his 1952 novel Kiss Me, Deadly to be destroyed when the comma was left out of the title.

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12. The most familiar name, Arthur Conan Doyle, the writer of Sherlock Holmes, was a professional ophthalmologist, and in order to meet his needs, he switched to writing. The rest is history.

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13. The following words were invented by William Shakespeare: hurry, boredom, disgraceful, hostile, money’s worth, obscene, puke, perplex, on purpose, shooting star, sneak etc. Until this time people had to have conversation without these words.

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14. In the book Les Miserables by Victor Hugo, there’s one sentence that is 823 words long.

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15. Love the smell of books?! That’s called “Bibliosmia”.

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16. “Tsundoku” is a Japanese word meaning “buying a load of books and then not reading them”.

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17. First Indian novel written in Hindi was Bhagyawati by Shardha Ram Phillauri in 1888, though Pariksha Guru by Lala Srinivas Das, published in 1882 is also seen as a first proper Indian novel. The First Indian Novel in Bangla was – Durgeshnandini by Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay in 1865. The First Indian novel in English was Rajmohan’s Wife by Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay in 1864.

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Books let us expand vocabulary, increase empathy, boost analytical thinking, make us seem class apart, enhance memory, prove therapeutic, make us learn something  new every day and prevents Alzheimer’s.

Present yourself with a book. Cherish reading! 🙂

Credits:
Compilation- Saket Kumar Singh