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LITERATURE
(Trivia)
(079 Entries)

1)
25 percent of all Americans believe that Sherlock Holmes was a real person.

2)
The bible is the most shoplifted book in the world.

3)
20 percent of all publications sold in Japan are comic books.

4)
English author, Charles Dickens, always used to touch things three times for luck.

5)
English writer William Shakespeare has no living descendants.

6)
Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen had a pet scorpion which he used to keep on his desk for inspiration.

7)
British writer Charles Dickens earned no more money from his many books as he did from doing lectures.

8)
British writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, once played cricket for the MCC and once bowled the legendary W.C. Grace.

9)
British writer Charles Dickens always slept towards the North because he thought that it would improve his writing.

10)
British playwright Samuel Beckett's play "Breath" is the shortest performed play ever written. It last's for only 35 seconds and consists of human breaths and cries.

11)
British writer Lewis Carroll, author of "Alice In Wonderland" wrote most of his books standing up.

12)
In the 1631 publication of The Bible, a printer accidentally omitted the word "Not" from the seventh commandment, encouraging readers to commit adultery.

13)
British writer Lord Archer used to work as a deckchair attendant when he was 18 years old, during the holiday season in Weston-Super-Mare.

14)
The very first book about plastic surgery was written in 1597.

15)
Russian writer Konstantin Mikhailov used to have 325 pseudonyms.

16)
British writer Mary Shelly was only 19 years old when she wrote "Frankenstein".

17)
British writer Dr. Samuel Johnson wrote the story "Rasselas" in one week so he could earn the money to pay for his mother's funeral.

18)
Writer Baroness Orczy who wrote "The Scarlet Pimpernel" couldn't speak a word of English until she was 15 years old.

19)
British writer and poet Lord Byron once had an affair with his half sister and made her pregnant.

20)
US writer Mark Twain's book "The Adventures Of Tom Sawyer" was the first novel to be written on a typewriter.

21)
British poet Alfred Lord Tennyson once had a pony called Fanny which used to pull his wife along in a wheelchair.

22)
French writer Marcel Proust once had a pet swordfish.

23)
British poet Lord Byron owned a pet bear while he was at Cambridge University because the rules said that dogs were not allowed.

24)
Writer Margaret Mitchell, who wrote the bestselling book "Gone With The Wind" didn't write any other books in her lifetime.

25)
Iceland publishes more books than any other country in the world.

26)
British poet George Bernard Shaw was 29 years old when he lost his virginity to an elderly widow. This event traumatised him so much that he didn't have sex for another 15 years.

27)
Scottish poet Robert Burns once owned a pet ewe called Poor Mallie which he wrote two poems about.

28)
Writer D.H. Lawrence who was well known for erotic novels such as "Lady Chatterley's Lover" was a prude in real life and would only make love in the dark.

29)
The glow from six firefly insects provides enough light to read a book.

30)
French writer Alexander Dumas suffered terribly from insomnia. So desperate was he to get sleep that he once ate an apple under the Arch De Triomphe to help him sleep.

31)
Hans Christian Andersen was so terrified of being killed in a fire that he always carried a piece of rope with him wherever he went so that he could escape any building that was alight.

32)
The country with the largest number of libraries and books in the world is Russia.

33)
At one time not only were Chinese books written back to front but they also had the footnotes printed at the top of the page.

34)
During the Chinese Cultural Revolution all literary works by Charles Dickens and William Shakespeare were banned.

35)
The very first crossword puzzle to appear in a newspaper was in the 'New York World' in 1913.

36)
English diarist Samuel Pepys loved to play the recorder.

38)
English poet Ben Johnson had his heel bone stolen by the Dean of Westminster when his grave was disturbed in 1849. It later turned up again in a junkshop in 1938.

38)
Charles Darwin who wrote the book 'The origin of species' which rocked the church, once trained for holy orders himself.

39)
In North Carolina, USA, in 1980 a library forbade children to read the Holy Bible without parental consent.

40)
When the poet Rosetti's wife died he decided to bury his book of poems with her
Seven years later he changed his mind and decided that he wanted them back so he arranged for the grave to be opened, removed the book of poems and had them disinfected.
They were later published to great acclaim.

41)
18th century English playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan was such a compulsive drinker that he would drink eau-de-cologne.

42)
The largest book in the world is 7ft tall and 10ft across when opened.

43)
During the French Revolution the new French Constitution was actually bound with the tanned leather skin of a guillotined aristocrat!

44)
Russian author Dostoyevsky was a foot fetishist.

45)
Author Scott Fitzgerald was also a foot fetishist.

46)
Author John Milton who wrote the book 'Paradise Lost' received just £10.00 for this classic book during his entire lifetime.

47)
Two out of every three women in the world are illiterate.

48)
There is approximately one library book for each and every person on earth.

49)
Author Truman Capote would only ever write on yellow paper.

50)
William Prynne, the English pamphleteer, had his ears cut off because of his inflammatory publications.

51)
Mathematicians in France produced a 400 page book showing the value of pi to one million figures.

52)
In Bram Stoker's novel "Dracula" the Count had a moustache.

53)
The novelist Anthony Trollope also invented the pillar box.

54)
Russia once banned all of the Sherlock Holmes books because of the great detective's belief in spiritualism.
Fortunately they are now available again.

55)
Jane Austen's book "Northanger Abbey" was originally called "Susan".

56)
The book "Catch 22" was originally entitled "Catch 18".

57)
English author Charles Dickens would work himself up so much when he performed his own works on stage that he sometimes fainted.

58)
Mr. William Ireland once forged a new version of "King Lear" and various other documents supposedly written by Shakespeare.
He then wrote a story called "Voltigern" which he claimed was a lost Shakespearean play.
Many scholars examined the documents and declared them to be authentic but when it was performed on stage it was so terrible that it was booed off.

59)
In Shakespeare's play "Julius Caesar" there is a reference to a clock striking.
Clocks did not appear until at least a thousand years after Caesar's death.

60)
The 'New York Times' once published an apology to a professor 49 years after his theories about travelling into space, which they had scoffed at, were proved to be correct.

61)
Sir Winston Churchill wrote his book "The History of the English Speaking Peoples" when he was 82 years old.

62)
In 1975 Indian poet Sri Chinmoy wrote 843 different poems in a single day.

63)
In William Shakespeare's book "The Winter's Tale" he writes about a ship that has been wrecked off the coast of Bohemia.
Bohemia has never had a coastline.

64)
Books that are made in the present day only have a life expectancy of about 100 years because the sulphuric acid in the wood pulp paper rots rapidly.

65)
William Shakespeare's signature is worth millions of dollars. There are only seven known specimens in the entire world.

66)
There are more than 13,000 existing towns and cities in Great Britain that can claim to have been mentioned in the Domesday Book.

67)
The very first daily newspaper in England was "The Daily Courant".

68)
The very first newspaper to use a perfumed page was the "Washington Daily News" in 1937.

69)
The very first issue of the "Lady" magazine gave it's readers detailed instructions on how to take a bath properly.
Although being a woman's magazine the article was illustrated with pictures of a man instead of a woman because of decency.

70)
Karl Marx rarely took a bath and suffered from boils most of his life.

71)
English author Charles Dickens drew most of his inspiration from Victorian life in London. This was mainly due to the fact that he would walk as much as 20 miles a night around the streets of London to cure his insomnia.

72)
In Denmark, an author who wrote a book criticising the Swedes, who were at that time occupying his country, was arrested and then given the choice of either being beheaded or of eating his own words.
He opted to eat his own words by boiling his book in broth and making a soup out of it.

73)
In England in 1272 AD the cost of a Holy Bible in nine handwritten volumes cost about £33.00.

74)
All the following famous novels were originally rejected by publishers.
a) The Time Machine (H.G. Wells)
b) The Mysterious Affair At Styles (Agatha Christie)
c) Harry Potter And The Philosopher's Stone (J.K. Rowling)
d) The Razor's Edge (W. Somerset Maugham)
e) The Good Earth (Pearl Buck)
f) The Picture Of Dorian Gray (Oscar Wilde)
g) Moby Dick (Herman Melville)
h) The Naked And The Dead (Norman Mailer)
i) Northanger Abbey (Jane Austen)
j) Barchester Towers (Anthony Trollope)
k) The Ginger Man (J.P. Donleavy)
l) Catch - 22 (Joseph Heller)
m) The Wind In The Willows (Kenneth Grahame)
n) A Time To Kill (John Grisham)
o) The Rainbow (D.H. Lawrence)
p) The Spy Who Came In From The Cold (John Le Carre)
q) Animal Farm (George Orwell)
r) Tess of the D'Urbervilles (Thomas Hardy)
s) Lord Of The Flies (William Golding)

75)
The following famous books and their 'original' titles.
a) Lady Chatterley's Lover (D.H. Lawrence) - "Tenderness"
b) Roots (Alex Haley) - "Before This Anger"
c) The Postman Always Rings Twice (James M. Cain) - "Bar-B-Q"
d) The Mill On The Floss (George Eliot) - "Sister Maggie"
e) Portnoy's Complaint (Philip Roth) - "A Jewish Patient Begins His Analysis"
f) East Of Eden (John Steinbeck) - "The Salinas Valley"
g) The Time Machine (H.G. Wells) - "The Chronic Argonauts"
h) Valley Of The Dolls (Jacqueline Susann) - "They Don't Build Statues To Businessmen"
i) Catch - 22 (Joseph Heller) - "Catch - 18"
j) Treasure Island (Robert Louis Stevenson) - "The Sea-Cook"
k) Jaws (Peter Benchley) - "The Summer Of The Shark"
l) War And Peace (Leo Tolstoy) - "All's Well That Ends Well"
m) Moby Dick (Herman Melville) - "The Whale"
n) Of Mice And Men (John Steinbeck) - "Something That Happened"
o) The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald) - "The High Bouncing Lover"
p) Gone With The Wind (Margaret Mitchell) - "Ba! Ba! Black Sheep"
q) Frankenstein (Mary Shelley) - "Prometheus Unchained"

76)
British author Dame Barbara Cartland is related to King Robert the Bruce of Scotland.

77)
Author Dick Francis served as a pilot officer in the RAF during World War II and flew Lancaster Bombers and Wellingtons.

78)
British author Jackie Collins was once expelled from school after being caught smoking.

79)
British author J.K. Rowling worked at the Amnesty International Office in London and the Manchester Chamber Of Commerce before becoming famous.