Facts are always fun and if you get to know fun facts then it will not only help you improve your knowledge about different factual truths but will also help you improve your craft.

This is especially important if the facts are about something that you love and that is exactly why if you are interested in books, this blog is going to be fun for you.

This is because we bring you this blog about the top 20 fun book facts that will not only improve your knowledge about books but will genuinely surprise you.

These facts will help you understand the importance of books for our human civilization as a whole and will also help you understand a lot of history.

We hope to present you with facts as latest as possible and these facts might even change with time and we would love to hear about them in the comment section so that we can keep on updating this blog for you.

So, grab yourself a nice coffee and just sit down and relax and enjoy these facts about books.

Top 20 Fun Facts About Books

The True International Bestseller

We all want to create a bestseller as authors and sometimes it might be very difficult.

Bestsellers usually occupy popularity and a location in a list if that book has been sold the most in a particular location for a few continuous weeks.

But how about a book that has remained the bestseller for nearly 2000 years and we are not even talking about a particular region or country?

The true international bestseller is the Bible. It is the book with the most printed copies in the world along with a bunch of other world records.

This is because there are an estimated more than 5 billion printed copies of the Bible around the world.

The Smell of Old Books

If you are a book lover like us then you probably love the smell of old books. You know exactly what we are talking about.

It is that awesome smell of old paper along with a combination of book glue and even the ink and this kind of a smell can mostly be found in old books and in old libraries.

There is actually a name for this, it is called bibliosmia. It is this sensation of enjoying the smell of old books.

Teeny Ted – The Tiniest Book

When you think of the smallest book in the world, you might imagine that book must be at least a few inches in height.

However, that is far from the truth with the world’s smallest book verified by the Guinness Book of World Records.

Teeny Ted from Turnip Town is the smallest book in the world and it can’t even be measured in inches because it measures 100×70 micrometres.

If you want to look at it then you might need a magnifying glass but if you want to read it then you might need a microscope.

Abiblophobia Is Real

We promise we are only going to talk about fun facts but this is a fact that is not fun for the people who experienced it and this is something quite truly real.

We are talking about the fear of an empty bookshelf. Yes, this is an actual fear and it has an actual term and it means people who truly love books might develop this fear of their bookshelves being empty.

This leads them to keep on buying books even before they finish their existing collection because their greatest fear is that they might finish reading all the books they have and might not have anything more to read.

Luckily there are libraries as well as bookstores that help them.

Macabre Books

If we talk about disturbing books then the list can become quite huge because there are disturbing books that talk about disturbing history and then there are books that talk about disturbing occurrences in psychology.

However, those are the subject matter of that book and it will probably not disturb anyone when those books are closed.

But think of a book that is so disturbing that people do not like to look at it or find it very fascinating to look at.

That most disturbing kind of book definitely has to be made of something disturbing. That is why when we talk about macabre books, we are talking about books that are made from human skin.

Yes, these kinds of books are actually real and you can even check them out at Harvard University library.  Now it’s beyond our thinking why would someone make a book like that but they exist.

The Largest Book Collection

When you talk about the largest book collection, we do not obviously mean libraries because public libraries out there contain millions of volumes.

That is why when we talk about the largest book collection in the world, we mean the largest privately owned book collection that is in public knowledge.

That has to be John Q. Benham’s book collection. It is estimated that he has at least 1.5 million volumes large.

While it is impossible to know the actual number but the key thing to understand about him is that he has been collecting and expanding his collection for over 50 years and it houses a very diverse collection of rare books.

20 Days of Effort

Let’s now look at a fact that our authors and writers would love and this is something that we have actually dug up from our own calculations.

It takes an author roughly 3 weeks or 20 days of dedicated writing to complete a novel on average.  However, saying that would be wrong because nobody writes 24 hours a day.

So let us break it down into hours because it takes nearly 500 hours to complete a novel. This means a few hours every day for a few months.

And we are not even including things like research as well as the time it takes to edit the manuscript.

First Novel on A Typewriter

Mark Twain was the first novelist to use a typewriter actively for his novels. This was a relatively new technology and authors did not want to get into it.

After he started using it and published his novel Adventure of Tom Sawyer in 1876 solely written on a typewriter, it gave hope and assurance to other authors to also do the same and adopt the tech.

Fast forward to today when most authors type on a keyboard, a derivative of the typewriter.

Codex Leicester

Books have come down in price by a lot and there are even options to get books for virtually nothing with different subscription models if you like eBooks.

But would you like to know which is the most expensive book in the world? You definitely cannot buy it in any bookstore.

Well, this book cost Bill Gates $30.8 million which he actually paid for at an auction. We are talking about the Codex Leicester by Leonardo Da Vinci.

It is probably one of the most important books to exist in history.

Harry Potter Books Banned

Are you a Potterhead? We sure are and that is why this is a very fun fact that you should know and perhaps be glad you are not from the US.

If you think about the books banned in the US then you might think of some books that have to do with USSR or China.

You are going to be surprised to find out that Harry Potter books fall into the category of most banned books in the US.

This is because America is actually quite religious and since the Harry Potter Series books contain things like witchcraft it’s banned a lot in several districts and places that are religious.

Over A Million

While it is impossible to put an exact number to it, over a million books are published each year on planet Earth.

China leads in the game when it comes to publishing as it publishes nearly 40% of all books in the world followed by the US and then the UK.

Now that is quite a number that we would like to match and change and bring India to the forefront of the greatest number of books published one book at a time.

Only Two Fingers

If you remember the fact about the time it takes to write a novel then you are going to appreciate this fact even more.

You have probably heard about Lord of The Rings or The Hobbit but would you believe it if we told you that it was only written with two fingers?

Yes, that’s right because J.R.R. Tolkien used to type with two fingers and he had written the entire Lord of The Rings Trilogy of 1200 pages using just two fingers.

Beyond The Printed Text

You probably know that books come in all shapes and sizes and all kinds of formats and you are probably familiar with audiobooks as well as eBooks.

But there are also special kinds of books that do not use ink. Yes, these books are printed but there is no ink in the book.

We are of course talking about Braille books for visually impaired readers. Every popular novel out there and every important book has its brail version for visually impaired readers and it is more common than you think.

A Lot of Translations

You might have heard of the Iliad and Odyssey and thought to yourself how many times has it been translated and for which languages?

So, you might also ask, which book holds the record for having the greatest number of translations?  Translations into over 3000 languages to be exact.

The Bible holds that record too because it is the book that has been the most translated book in the world for a while now and has been translated into over 3000 languages.

The Largest Book

The largest book in the world measures approximately 5 by 7 feet in size when it is closed and it weighs nearly 60 kilograms in weight.

We are of course talking about “Bhutan: A Visual Odyssey Across the Last Himalayan Kingdom” by Michael Hawley.

It is a fascinating picture book.

The Shortest Novel

Some people think that the shortest novel in the world is “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” by Ernest Hemingway.

However, It is a flash fiction experiment that shows the power of storytelling but it was never meant to be a novel.

The shortest novel in the world is actually “Mickey Mouse and the Medicine Man” by Walt Disney. It is just one sentence long.

While we do not encourage the piracy of novels but we can surely tell you the entire novel here. It goes like this, “Suddenly Mickey realized the peril of Goofy’s position.” And that’s the entire novel.

The Youngest Author

The thing about publishing is that it is never too early or it is never too late to write a book and this is probably what Dorothy Straight had in mind when she wrote her book “How the World Began”.

Would you like to guess how old she was when she wrote her book?

She was just 4 years old and it is a record that has still not been broken by anyone.

She did not write it to have it published because she probably did not know what publishing meant at 4. She wrote it for her grandmother.

Oldest Surviving Printed Book

The Diamond Sutra or the Vajracchedika Prajnaparamita Sutra is the oldest surviving printed book in the world.

It is estimated to have been printed all the way back in 868 AD which makes it more than a thousand years old.

It was found in China in the early 1900s and it contains a valuable collection of manuscripts that are very important to Mahayana Buddhism.

The Top Three Ever

If you want to know the top 3 most read books in the world then you might not be surprised with the first one which is definitely the Bible.

The second name in the list might also not be surprising because it is Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung and it is a compulsory book in China.

However, the third name on the list might surprise you because it is Harry Potter books because they are among the most read books in the world.

Books And Mental Health

Multiple studies have proven and concluded the fact that books can actually be excellent for your mental health.

Studies have even suggested that reading books can even prevent Alzheimer’s and even Dementia and that is why if you are a reader all your life then there is a lesser likelihood that you will ever get Alzheimer’s.

So, keep reading!

We hope this was fun for you to read as much as it was fun for us to write and we would love to bring you fun blogs like this about books because we all love books.

And if you are planning on publishing a book just on a topic like this on fun facts or anything and you want a reliable publishing company that can publish for you then you can count on us.

We are Orange Publishers and we are the fastest-growing legacy publishing company in India with the convenience of a self-publisher.

We publish in nearly every fiction and non-fiction genre of books and we do everything in-house whether it is the book cover design as well as the illustrations to the printing and publishing and even the copyright.

We welcome you to visit our website and check out everything we do.