Oddities and Wonder

Oddities and Wonder: Things you were dying to know, but were afraid to ask!

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

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

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

Jonathan Swift wrote a classic book called Gulliver's Travels that borders on science fiction. 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 first book ever written on a typewriter was The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Mark Twain used a Remington in 1875.

Americans buy 57 books per second, approximately five million books a day. 125 new titles are published every day. It would take a shelf 78 miles long to hold all of one day's books.

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

Interestingly, William Shakespeare invented the word "hurry." The following words were invented by William Shakespeare: boredom, disgraceful, hostile, money's worth, obscene, puke, perplex, on purpose, shooting star, and sneak. Until his time, people had to have their conversations without these words. And speaking of Shakespeare, can you imagine John Wayne reciting Shakespeare? Well, he did one time, and won a Shakespeare contest.

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

In the book, Les Miserables by Victor Hugo, is one sentence that is 823 words long. When Vic wrote to his editor inquiring about their opinion of the manuscript, he wrote, "?" They answered, "!"

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.