Amazing Literary Facts You Should Know
1. The best-selling novel of all time
A Spanish novel by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra Don Quixote is the best-selling novel of all time, with over 500 million copies sold. Don Quixote is considered the most influential work of literature from the Spanish Golden Age and the entire Spanish literary canon.
http://leopoldclassiclibrary.
2. What country banned Carroll's Alice in Wonderland?
In 1931, "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" was included in the list of prohibited works in the Chinese province of Hunan. The Governor believed that animals should not be given the power to use the human language and that animals and humans could not be put on the same level.
http://leopoldclassiclibrary.
3. Longest book in the world
'A la recherche du temps perdu' a novel in 7 volumes written by Marcel Proust is one of the longest book in the world at 9,609,000 characters, 1,267,069 words and 3,031 pages. Translated into In Search of Lost Time (previously Remembrance of Things Past), the book tells the story of the narrator's experiences growing up. It is considered to be his most prominent work, known both for its length and its theme of involuntary memory.
4. Who helped Leo Tolstoy to write his finest work?
Tolstoy's wife, Sophia Tolstaya, copied by hand as many as seven separate complete manuscripts of War and Peace (the 1400 page novel) before Tolstoy considered it again ready for publication.
http://leopoldclassiclibrary.
5. Most known Victor Hugo's word long sentence
In Victor Hugo's novel, Les Miserables, you can find a sentence that is 823 words long. In fact there are pretty much sentences that have a lot more words. The longest sentence award goes to Jonathan Coe's The Rotter's Club (13,955 word sentence) and for a runner-up, James Joyce, Ulysses (4,391 word sentence). However, these sentences are simply many sentences without punctuation, so-called "run-on" sentences in which two or more independent clauses are joined without an appropriate punctuation or conjunction.
http://leopoldclassiclibrary.
6. Sherlock Holmes: Pioneer in Forensic Science
Arthur Conan Doyle in his stories about Sherlock Holmes described many methods of criminalistics, which were still unknown to the police. Among them, the collection of cigarette butts and cigarette ash, the identification of typewriters. He uses trace evidence (such as shoe and tire impressions), fingerprints, ballistics, and handwriting analysis to evaluate his theories and those of the police. Some of the detective's investigative techniques, such as fingerprint and handwriting analysis, were in their infancy when the stories were written. Subsequently, the police began to make extensive use of these and other methods of Holmes.
Arthur Conan Doyle's major works:
The sign of four - http://leopoldclassiclibrary.
The Valley of Fear - http://leopoldclassiclibrary.
7. What book consisted of only blank pages?
When asked what five books he would take with him to a desert island, George Bernard Shaw replied that he would take five blank books. In 1974 this concept was embodied by the American publishing house Harmony Books, releasing a book called "The Book of Nothing", which consisted of only 192 blank pages. The book also had the following explanation from the publishers: The Nothing Book is a blank book. The possibilities are endless. Write your own novel, compile a personal cookbook, draw pictures, make lists, keep records, collect autographs, write poetry, plan vacations, start a diary or scrapbook, design clothes, invent needlework or knitting patterns, doodle, compose songs, jot down important dates, keep a guest book, press flowers, gather favorite quotes, accumulate (or invent) funny stories, use your imagination and do your own thing The Nothing Book is your book, it is meant to be whatever you want it to be. As Byron once wrote:
'Tis pleasant, sure, to see one's name in print; A book's a book, although there's nothing in't.