So, we all know reading is the greatest hobby there is. It allows you to escape into other lives, worlds, and galaxies, but it also allows you to learn new ideas, facts, and ways of interpreting and understanding the world around you. Not to mention it allows you to touch, smell, hold, rub your face on the beautiful, fragrant capsules of wonder known as books.
Reading has been proven time and time again to make you happier and more empathetic, to make you smarter, even to deter diseases like Alzheimers in some cases. Here are fourteen facts that will allow you to further justify the “sick day” (read: reading day) that you just might take tomorrow.
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1. There are over 130 million books in print.
2. The word for loving the smell of old books is ‘Bibliosmia’. Similar to carbon-dating, scientists can analyze the chemicals responsible for “old book smell” to determine the age of a book. The process is called “material degradomics”.
3. The three most read books in the world are The Holy Bible, Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung, and Harry Potter.
4. Nevada, Texas, and Mississippi have the highest ratio of customers to bookstores in the United States.
5. Dr Seuss invented the word ‘nerd’, using it in his 1950 book ‘If I Ran the Zoo.’
6. 68% of books sold worldwide are bought by women.
7. The term ‘bookworm’ originates from insects who live in and feed on the binding of books.
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8. The most expensive book in the world is the 1640 Bay Psalm, which sold for $14.2 million.
9. The largest book in the world is The Klencke Atlas, which measures 1.75 meters tall, and 1.90 meters wide when open.
10. Fools Of Nature by Alice Brown was the first book to be described as a ‘bestseller,’ in 1889.
11. 1453 saw the first ever book published: the Gutenberg Bible. It was printed by the inventor of the printing press, Johannes Gutenberg.
12. Longest novel ever written is Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust, containing an estimated 9,609,000 characters.
13. Tsundoku means “to let reading materials pile up in one’s home and never read them” in Japanese.
14. Charles Dickens owned a bookcase which functioned as a secret door in his house, and was populated with fake books bearing amusing names including Jonah’s Account of the Whale, The Lives of a Cat which came in nine volumes, and The Art of Cutting Teeth.
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Featured Image Via Bustle.