National Book Lovers Day harnesses all the excitement bibliophiles feel about books into one celebration on August 9th.
A day for all those who love to read, National Book Lovers Day encourages you to find your favorite reading place, a good book (whether it be fiction or non-fiction) and read the day away.
- Bibliophile – a person who has a great appreciation for or collects books.
- The very first books used parchment or vellum (calf skin) for the book pages.
- The book covers were made of wood and often covered with leather.
- The books were fitted with clasps or straps.
- Public libraries appeared in the Middle Ages.
- Public libraries often chained the books to a shelf or a desk to prevent theft.
- Along with several recent developments, book manufacturers use digital printing. Book pages are printed using toner rather than ink.
- More and more, people read E-books. E-book (electronic book) refers to a book-length publication in digital form. Read an E-book on a computer or via a portable book display device known as an e-book reader, such as a Reader, Nook or Kindle.
- An estimated 755,755 new books are published every year. As of mid-2017, there are an estimated 134,399,411 total published books in the world
- The longest sentence ever printed is 823 words. It’s a legit sentence that exists in Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables, according to Barnes and Noble.
- The first book ever written using a typewriter was The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.
- President Theodore Roosevelt read one book per day.
- The three most read books in the world are…The Holy Bible, Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung, and Harry Potter.
- “Bibliosmia” is the word for loving the smell of old books.
- The earliest known work of literature is an epic poem titled the Epic of Gilgamesh, from Ancient Mesopotamia. Because paper books did not exist at the time, the whole tale is told on 12 tablets.
- The current largest library in the world is the United States Library of Congress, which houses more than 38 million books. Originally, the library was conceived by James Madison and established by legislation from President John Adams for use as a resource for congress. Pretty much all books that are published in the United States must be sent to the Library of Congress, due to the US Copyright Act’s mandatory deposit provisions.
- “Packhorse Librarians” Were the Bookmobiles of the Great Depression. During the Great Depression, one of FDR’s New Deal programs was the Pack Horse Library Initiative. Librarians would ride on horseback into the Appalachian mountains to provide books and literacy to the mountain-folk of Kentucky. In order to gain the trust of suspicious mountain families who did not take kindly to outsiders, book carriers would sometimes read bible passages to prove that they were not a threat.
- Science fiction writer Isaac Asimov (1920-1992) is the only author to have published a book in nine out of the ten Dewey library categories.
- Charles Dickens’s house had a secret door in the form of a fake bookcase. The fake books included titles such as ‘The Life of a Cat’ in 9 volumes.
Sources:
