A Brief History
On September 6, 2022, we celebrate National Read a Book Day, one of the truly worthwhile “days” of the year, when we are all reminded that there is more to life than television and the internet.
Digging Deeper
Here are a few book related facts you might find interesting:
The longest book, according to the Guinness Book of World Records, is Marcel Proust’s elephantine Remembrance of Things Past, boasting an incredible 9,609,000 characters, meaning letters and spaces.
The Oldest Book might be The Epic of Gilgamesh, which dates back to 2100 BC, though dates on ancient books are hard to verify, and another work, The Pyramid Texts of ancient Egypt, might be older, but are not books as we think of them.
The most widely read book of all time is the Christian Bible in all its forms, with an incredible 3.9 billion printed and sold in just the last 50 years. The Quran is probably the second most widely read book in history, but can you guess the third? That might well be The Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse Tung of China, better known as “The Little Red Book.”
Of course, the best books of all time are those written by Dr. Zar…
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Historical Evidence
For more information, please see…
Markham, J. David and Matthew Zarzeczny. Simply Napoleon. Simply Charly, 2017.
Seelye Jr., James E. and Shawn Selby, editors. Shaping North America: From Exploration to the American Revolution [3 volumes]. ABC-CLIO, 2018.
Zarzeczny, Matthew. Meteors That Enlighten the Earth: Napoleon and the Cult of Great Men. Cambridge Scholars, 2013.
The featured image in this article, a photograph of NASA astronaut and Expedition 65 Flight Engineer Megan McArthur reading a book in the cupola, the International Space Station’s “window to the world,” while orbiting 265 miles above the northern Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Canada, is in the public domain in the United States because it was solely created by NASA. NASA copyright policy states that “NASA material is not protected by copyright unless noted“. (See Template:PD-USGov, NASA copyright policy page or JPL Image Use Policy.)
You can also watch video versions of this article on YouTube.
