A BIT OF FUN FACTS
month of January 2025
12 Interesting Facts of January.
1. The largest book in the world is 16.4 feet by 26.44 feet in size and weighs 3,306 pounds. Entitled This The Prophet Mohamed, the book is compilation of stories about the Islam prophet Mohamed and was constructed in the United Arab Emirates in 2012. Source: Guinness World Records
2. The most expensive book in the world is the Codex Leicester, a handwritten scientific journal by Leonardo da Vinci. It was bought by Bill Gates in 1994 for $30.8 million dollars, which is roughly $61.6 million today when adjusted for inflation. Source: The New York Times
3. The term ‘bookworm’ originates from many different types of insects that cause damage to books by feeding upon bindings and pages. It first became a term for voracious readers in Elizabethan times. Source: Merriam Webster
4. The best-selling book of all time is the Christian Bible. It is believed that about 5 billion Bibles have been printed and sold worldwide. Source: Guinness World Records
5. The oldest continually operating library in the world is at Saint Catherine’s Monastery located at the foot of Mount Sinai in Egypt. The library was built between A.D. 548 and A.D. 565 and contains more than 3,300 manuscripts in its collection. Source: SinaiPalimpsests.org
6. The largest fine for an overdue library book was $345.15, paid by a woman who borrowed a book of poetry from Kewanee Public Library in Kewanee, Illinois in April of 1955. She returned it over 47 years later. Source: Guinness World Records
7. The largest library in the world – by catalog size – is the U.S. Library of Congress in Washington D.C. As of November 2021, the library housed 173,731,463 items. Source: Guinness World Records
8. Two libraries in Portugal utilize bats as a means of pest control. The Joanina Library at the University of Coimbra and the Library at the National Palace of Mafra are both home to indoor-outdoor bat colonies that eat insects that feed on book bindings and pages. Source: Smithsonian Magazine
9. The record for the most overdue library book was set in 1956 when a copy of a book written in German on the Archbishop of Bremen was returned to Sidney Sussex College in Cambridge, England 288 years after it had been borrowed. Found in the library of the Marquess of Cholmondeley, the book was returned but no fine was exacted. Source: Guinness World Records
10. A fully-emoji copy of Moby Dick by Herman Melville, known as Emoji Dick, is the first emoji book in the Library of Congress’ collection and remains the longest novel ever to be translated into emojis. Source: Guinness World Records
11. The Haskell Free Library and Opera House sits directly on the border between the United States and Canada. The only entrance to the library is in Derby Line, Vermont but Canadians are allowed to visit as long as they return to their home country afterward. Source: HaskellOpera.com
12. I don’t have any more just testing you to see if you read this far down and if you did — you are a gem!.
month of December 2024
12 Interesting Facts of December.
1. Christina Rossetti wrote the words to the Christmas carol ‘In the Bleak Midwinter.’
Rossetti (1830-94) is regarded as one of the finest 19th-century female poets. Rossetti wrote the words to the carol during the mid-19th century, but it only became a musical piece in the early 20th century. The first musical accompaniment for Rossetti’s carol was the work of none other than Gustav Holst, the British composer most famous for the Planets suite.
2. Poet Nahum Tate wrote the words for ‘While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks.’
Tate (1652-1715) was also the man who rewrote Shakespeare’s King Lear to give it a happy ending, although he is now probably more famous for penning the words to this popular carol. Tate was also one of the first people to hold the official post of Poet Laureate in Britain, between 1692 and 1715, and he wrote the words to Henry Purcell’s famous opera Dido and Aeneas.
3. Washington Irving arguably did as much for Christmas as Charles Dickens did.
Although we often talk about Dickens (1812-70) as the one who helped to popularize and rejuvenate Christmas as a time of festivity, through his celebrated 1843 book A Christmas Carol, Dickens himself was highly influenced by Irving (1783-1859), the American writer of fairy tales such as Sleepy Hollow and Rip van Winkle. Irving helped to inspire Dickens’ vision of the season, drawing on traditional English Christmas celebrations that had, at the time, fallen out of fashion on both sides of the Atlantic.
4. In Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, Tiny Tim was originally going to be called ‘Little Fred.’
Dickens had two brothers called ‘Fred,’ Frederick and Alfred, the latter of whom died young. He probably altered the name to ‘Tiny Tim’ because the alliteration made the name catchier.
5. There is a species of snail called Ba humbugi.
The Fijian snail is named after Scrooge’s famous exclamation in A Christmas Carol, although Scrooge only utters the words ‘Bah, humbug!’ twice in the whole story (though he exclaims ‘Humbug!’ a number of times).
6. The words to ‘Once in Royal David’s City’ were written by the same person who wrote the hymn ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful.’
Her name was Mrs. Cecil Alexander, and her version of ‘All Things Bright’ is but one of several (although it is the most famous).
7. Much of our modern idea of Santa Claus comes from the 1823 poem ‘A Visit from St Nicholas.’
More commonly known by its first line, ”Twas the night before Christmas,’ this poem popularized the image of St. Nick as a jolly fat man wearing fur-trimmed red robes (long before the Coca-Cola adverts popularized this). The poem also introduced us to the names of all of Santa’s reindeer. It was published anonymously, and probably written by an American professor called Clement Clarke Moore — although this claim has been disputed by some.
8. ‘Father Christmas’ first appears in a play by Ben Jonson.
The term ‘Father Christmas’ — used to refer to the personification of the festive season, a bit like ‘Old Father Time’ — first turns up in a 1616 masque (a festive play for performance at royal courts) by Shakespeare’s contemporary, playwright and poet Ben Jonson. Christmas, His Masque features old man ‘Christmas,’ attended by all ten of his children, whose names include Carol, Wassail, Misrule, and Minced-Pie.
9. T. S. Eliot’s poem ‘Journey of the Magi’ was originally commissioned to be included in a Christmas card.
Eliot’s poem about the Magi’s journey to visit the infant Christ was written rapidly in an afternoon, at the request of his publisher, Faber and Faber, who wanted a poem to go inside a series of shilling greeting-cards known as Ariel Poems. The first five lines of Eliot’s 1927 poem are ‘borrowed’ from a Christmas sermon given by Lancelot Andrewes (1555-1626), one of the key translators of the King James Bible and a considerable influence on Eliot (who had become an Anglican earlier in the same year).
10. Harper Lee’s friend gave her a year’s wages for Christmas, on condition that she give up work and write. She wrote To Kill a Mockingbird.
A rather brilliant Christmas present, I think you’ll agree. And talking of which…
11. The earliest known use of the phrase ‘Christmas present’ is from a 1663 entry in the diary of Samuel Pepys.
This is according to the Oxford English Dictionary. Pepys recorded in February of that year: ‘I was told that my Lady Castlemaine had all the King’s Christmas presents made him by the Peeres given to her.’
12. Between 1920 and 1942, J. R. R. Tolkien wrote a series of letters to his children from ‘Father Christmas.’
The Father Christmas Letters were published posthumously in 1976 and have been linked to Tolkien’s major work, The Hobbitand The Lord of the Rings. Some scholars — such as Laurence and Martha Krieg in the journal Mythlore — have even suggested that the character of Gandalf was partly inspired by the figure of Father Christmas.
month of November 2024
In 1582 – William Shakespeare weds Anne Hathaway. Before becoming the literary genius we recognise today, 18-year-old Will married 26-year-old Hathaway in Stratford-on-Avon. He would have three children with her and a successful career in London
Then in 1910 – Leo Tolstoy’s death. The Russian writer is considered one of the greatest of all time, and is the author of classics War and Peace and Anna Karenina. Tolstoy received nominations for the Nobel Prize in Literature every year from 1902 to 1906 and for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1901, 1902, and 1909, but never won.
Follow that up with 1963 – Aldous Huxley dies. Huxley’s most famous work is the dystopian novel Brave New World (1932) but he wrote 50 books as well as numerous poems and essays. If you lost your high school copy, buy it by clicking here.
And today, November 15th is I Love to Write Day. All great authors have to start somewhere, and a love of writing is where it begins. From professionals to hobbyists, this day is one for all to celebrate their love of writing.
Month of October 2024
Now for something a bit of fun in the world of authors and poets. Did you know that on September 12, 1846, the 40-year-old poet, translator, and critic Elizabeth Barrett (famous, reclusive, and famously reclusive, having been cursed with the classic Victorian pairing of weak lungs and rich father) eloped with Robert Browning (the son of a bank clerk, six years her junior, who wrote poems no one liked all that much at the time).
How did this happen?
Well think of the old AOL chat rooms just a little slower.
It began with a fan letter that Robert Browning first wrote to Barrett on January 10, 1845. “I love your verses with all my heart, dear Miss Barrett,—and this is no off-hand complimentary letter that I shall write,—whatever else, no prompt matter-of-course recognition of your genius, and there a graceful and natural end of the thing.
Since the day last week when I first read your poems, I quite laugh to remember how I have been turning and turning again in my mind what I should be able to tell you of their effect upon me, for in the first flush of delight I thought I would this once get out of my habit of purely passive enjoyment, when I do really enjoy, and thoroughly justify my admiration—perhaps even, as a loyal fellow-craftsman should, try and find fault and do you some little good to be proud of hereafter!—but nothing comes of it all—so into me has it gone, and part of me has it become, this great living poetry of yours, not a flower of which but took root and grew—Oh, how different that is from lying to be dried and pressed flat, and prized highly, and put in a book with a proper account at top and bottom, and shut up and put away . . . and the book called a ‘Flora,’ besides!
“I do, as I say, love these books with all my heart—and I love you too,” he goes and lets it all out in the final paragraph, describing how he might have met her years previously, but missed his chance.
I would be darn if she wrote back.
The two exchanged letters for months before they finally met, on May 16, 1845. Then correspondence became a courtship, and the next autumn, because Barrett’s father disliked and disapproved of Browning, they wed in secret at St Marylebone Parish Church in London before absconding to Europe, first to Paris for a honeymoon, and then to Italy, where they would live together in uncommon bliss for 15 years, despite Barrett’s inevitable disinheritance.
Italy was good to Barrett (now Elizabeth Barrett Browning): her health improved; she had a son (they called him Pen). She published the critically acclaimed Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850) and the bestselling Aurora Leigh (1857), but she died in 1861. “Mrs. Browning’s husband” returned to England to hang out and pursue his poetry; while he may not have been as famous as his wife at the beginning, by the time of his own death he had become an established and well-respected poet in his own right—and now, some 135 years later, they make quite the modern and romantic pair.
month of september 2024
Now here is a bunch of little titbits in the literary world you might or might not know that happen in September by some of your favourite authors a few years ago.
- Phillis Wheatley becomes the first published Black American poet with Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (September 1, 1773)
- Helen Keller graduates from Radcliffe (September 1, 1904)
- Kurt Vonnegut Jr. marries his childhood sweetheart, Jane Marie Cox (September 1, 1945)
- Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, which he wrote in “a furious eight-week blitz,” is published in Life (September 1, 1952)
- Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon is published (September 1, 1977)
- Frederick Douglass escapes from slavery disguised as a sailor (September 3, 1838)
- Charles Dickens burns most of his private papers at Gads Hill Place, his home in Kent with the secret bookcase door (September 3, 1860)
- The City of Los Angeles is founded, inspiring a novel or two (September 4, 1781)
- The word “hippie” appears in print for the first time, in the San Francisco Examiner (September 5, 1965)
- Arthur Conan Doyle’s very first story (though not one of his favourites), “The Mystery of Sasassa Valley,” is published in Chamber’s Journal (September 6, 1879)
- F. Scott Fitzgerald meets Zelda Sayre at a country club dance in Montgomery, Alabama (September 7, 1918).
On September 1, 2023, I published two of my books, “Books, Pens, and Larceny” and “Stories to Share With My Partner Book 4.”
You can get the e-book and audiobook on my website and for the paperback you can, of course, visit Amazon USA or Amazon AU for the book as well.
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