“Tsundoku” is a Japanese word for the habit of buying too many books, letting them pile up in your house, and never reading them.
100 Mind-Blowing Books Facts
Batman and Predator exist in the same fictional universe. Since 1991, they have been featured together in three comic books.
The average U.S. household has 300,000 things, from paper clips to ironing boards. U.S. children make up 3.7% of children on the planet but have 47% of all toys and children’s books.
Bookworms are actual insects that bore holes in books. A major book-feeding insect is a paper louse that feeds on microscopic mould in poorly kept books.
There is such an expansive collection of books in the British Library in their archive that if a person could read 5 books per day, it would take 80,000 years to complete.
John Steinbeck was born on February 27, 1902. He wrote 27 books, including Of Mice and Men.
The average inmate at Alcatraz read 75-100 books per year.
In 2010, Google tried to find out how many books there were in the world. They reckon there are about 130,000,000 of them. (Let’s call this one a semi-fact, though, ok?)
Marie Curie’s belongings still have radioactive residue in the present day. Marie Curie’s contributions to science had her named by many as the mother of modern physics. One of the works she was most known for was her study of radioactive materials and the discovery of elements such as polonium and radium. However, her research took a toll on her health. Radioactive exposure not only led to her death due to aplastic anaemia – but her clothes, furniture, and books remain radioactive to this day. Now, over a century later, her notebooks have to be stored in a lead box, as they will still be radioactive for another 1,500 years.
The Japanese have their word for book hoarders. ‘Tsundoku’ is the Japanese word for people who love to buy books but never read them. More often, these books are just left piled up inside their homes and never used.
The Indiana University library is constantly sinking. It sinks over half an inch annually. This is because engineers failed to calculate and include the estimated weight of all the books that would be placed inside the building.
Marie Curie’s old notebooks remain radioactive until today. Curie’s long exposure to radioactive material did not only affect her but most of her belongings as well. This includes her clothes, furniture, and books. Scientists state that her belongings that remain in a lead box will remain radioactive for at least another 1,500 years.
The case inspired several books, documentaries, and movies, including the 1993 film “Judgment Day: The John List Story.”
The Main Library at Indiana University sinks over an inch every year because when it was built, engineers failed to take into account the weight of all the books that would occupy the building.
Speaking of books, there are lots of them to get through. In 2010, Google confirmed that there are over 129,000,000 books in the world.
If you have children, you likely read them Dr. Seuss’s books. These favourites have been around for generations. But, you are likely saying the famed author’s name incorrectly. According to friends and family, the name rhymes with voice, not deuce.
In the late Middle Ages, books were so valuable that libraries would chain them to bookcases.
According to a Yale study, people who read books live on average 2 years longer than those who do not read at all.
In Ankara, Turkey, sanitation workers created a public library out of books they found while collecting garbage. It contains over 6,000 books.
Books published in Norway are bought by the government to stock the country’s libraries. All books must first go through quality control, and one thousand copies will be purchased and distributed by Arts Council Norway if they pass this step. If it’s a children’s book, 1,550 copies are purchased instead. Not only does this keep small publishing businesses afloat, but it’s also of immense benefit to fledgling writers in Norway.
Comic Sans is the most hated font in the world. Comic Sans was designed to be an unserious, handwritten style font to use in comic books. Although everyone loves to hate this tasteless font (including myself!), it is very useful for dyslexic people. Because of its asymmetrical style, the letters are much easier to discern.
Graffiti writers have what’s called a “black book,” which is a sketchbook where they draw and plan out prospective graffiti artwork. Writers use their black books to fine-tune their style and retain any ideas they may have for potential future use as a graffiti piece.
Linus was born in Finland, a bilingual country, and considers Swedish to be his “mother tongue”. He says he’s often “uncomfortable” speaking in English because of pronunciation differences but prefers to read English books.
GPT-1 was trained with BookCorpus, a large-scale dataset of more than 11,000 unpublished books designed for training and evaluating machine learning models whose primary focus was language understanding.
The chatbot was trained on a massive corpus of text data, around 570GB of datasets, including web pages, books, and other sources.