Fascinating book facts
The best-selling author of all time is Agatha Christie. Since 1920, her detective novels have sold over
one billion copies in English, and another billion in
over 45 foreign languages.
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There have been over 20,000 books written about the game of chess.
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Mills & Boon romantic novels first appeared in bookshops back in 1908, with global sales currently clocking in at over 200 million books every year.
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Edgar Allen Poe was probably the first author to
make a living from his writing.
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The original copies of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales were printed in 1477 by William Caxton, the first printer to introduce the printing press in England. Only one of these first copies is still in private hands and was sold in an auction in 1998 for ï¿¡4,621,500, making it the most expensive book ever sold at that time.
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China publishes over 200,000 new titles and new editions a year. It is by far the largest publishing market by volume – officially about 6 billion units a year.
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The poet John Keats was only five-feet tall — yet, by the time he died at the age of 24, he was considered a literary giant.
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Mark Twain was the first author to submit a typewritten manuscript, on a Remington he bought in 1874, though there are disputes as to whether it was The Adventures of Tom Sawyer or Life on the Mississippi.
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The longest novel is Marienbad My Love by Mark Leach at 17 million words.
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A single mother living on benefits in the 1990s,
JK Rowling went on to become the first person to make $1 billion by writing books, having penned seven Harry Potter novels that have sold nearly 500 million copies in over 60 languages.
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The first volume of recipes was published in 62AD by Apicius. Titled De Re Coquinaria, it described the feasts enjoyed by the Roman Emperor Claudius.
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The prolific James Patterson, who works with a team of co-authors to boost his output, published 10 books in 2009 and earned $80 million in 2010, with 20 titles on the US year-end bestseller lists.
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George Eliot’s real name was Mary Ann Evans.
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The Train from Nowhere, a French novel by Michel Thaler, was written without a single verb in it.
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The moons of the planets in the solar system are named after Greek gods, except for those of Uranus, which are named after Shakespearean characters.
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The Library of Congress in Washington DC contains
28 million books and has 532 miles of shelving.
The British Library in London is the second largest with 18 million books.