Flipping great
1 The first book written is thought to have been The Epic Of Gilgamesh, penned in 2100 BC in one of the oldest forms of writing – the cuneiform script.
2 Books were so valuable in the Middle Ages that they were chained to shelves like in the Citadel library from Game Of Thrones to stop them being stolen. Persistent book thieves suffer from bibliokleptomania.
3 Amsterdam Museum is home to the world’s tallest book – Collection Of Maritime Rules – which is 6ft 4in high and 3ft wide.
4 Napoleon Bonaparte could read at a rate of 2,000 words per minute, while French writer Honoré de Balzac could finish a small book in half an hour.
5 The novel Les Misérables by Victor Hugo contains the longest sentence ever printed at a whopping 832 words long. The 1998 film adaptation starred Uma Thurman and Liam Neeson.
6 Harvard University in the US has four law books bound in human skin on its shelves. The practice is known as anthropodermic bibliopegy and was popular with doctors many years ago.
7 Pulped copies of 2.5million Mills & Boon romance novels were used to build the top layer of the M6 toll road in Birmingham.
8 Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library donates free books to children in need around the world, with 5m books benefiting kids in the UK alone.
9 Your eyes look in different directions when reading 50% of the time, with the line of sight intersecting and diverging.
10 The most sold book on the planet is the Bible, which has been printed more than five billion times.
11 Artist Leonardo da Vinci’s science diary the Codex Leicester is the most expensive book in the world, selling for £24.5m in 1994 to Microsoft boss Bill Gates.
12 Late German fashion supremo Karl Lagerfeld had one of the biggest private library collections, with more than 60,000 tomes.
13 Having a fear of running out of something to read is called abibliophobia.
14 Speed reading lessons can help protect your eyesight and double your recall speed.
15 It’s estimated that 6-8m people in the UK are functionally illiterate with very limited reading skills. That’s 20% of the population.
16 Up to 50 books can be made from just a single tree.
17 Mark Twain wrote the first book on a typewriter – The Adventures Of Tom Sawyer.
18 Harry Potter books were banned across many US states due to the association with witchcraft. A Catholic school in Tennessee claimed they conjure evil spirits.
19 Reading regularly is said to prevent Alzheimer’s disease by up to two and a half times the average rate of developing the disease.
20 Enjoying the smell of old books is called bibliosmia.