I
enjoyed reading a copy of The Literary Life and Other Curiosities: Revised and Expanded by Robert Hendrickson. The 25-year-old book is a compendium of
literary curiosities and treats that should delight bibliophiles.
Here
are some interesting factoids presented in the book:
·
The
word typewriter came from American Christopher Latham Sholes, who patented the
very first commercial typewriter in 1868.
·
The
term “the pen is mightier than the sword” came from an 1839 play, Richelieu, by
Edward Bulwer Lytton.
·
The
most prolific published author in modern times is Kathleen Lindsay of South
Africa. She wrote 904 novels under six
pen names. She died at the age of 70 in 1973.
·
Did
you know the famous line: “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.” comes
from Sonnets from the Portuguese by Elizabeth Barrett Browning?
·
Lipograms
are books that purposely do not contain one or more letters of the alphabet.
·
A
sentence that contains all 26 letters of the alphabet is a pangram.
·
P.E.N.
(International Association of Poets, Playwrights, Editors, Essayists and Novelists)
turns 100 in 2021.
·
Which
writer has been written the most about in books? No. 1: Shakespeare. No. 2: Dante. No. 3:
Goethe. No. 4: Cervantes. No. 5: Dickens.
·
The
author of Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas,
claims to have fathered over 500 illegitimate children.
· A
bibliopole is simply a book dealer, while a bibliotaph is one who
conceals or hoards books, keeping them under lock and key, and a biblioclast
is somebody who destroys books for any reason, ideological or not. A bibliophile is someone who collects
and treasures books either for their value or for what’s in them, and a bibliomaniac
is a bibliophile gone bonkers, one who loves books to the point of
madness.
·
America’s
first book club was the Book-of-the-Month Club, founded in April 1926.
·
E
is the most commonly used letter in English.
It is followed in order of use by t, a, i, s, o, n, h, r, d, l, u, c, m.
f, w, y, p, g, b, v, k, j, q, x, z.
·
The
twelve most commonly used written English words:
1.
the
2.
of
3.
and
4.
to
5.
a
6.
in
7.
that
8.
is
9.
I
10.
it
11.
for
12.
as
Language Oddities
Did
you now that William Shakespeare used 22,000 different words in his plays,
which was a significant percentage of recorded words back then. The Old Testament, by comparison, only uses
6,000 unique words. The average American
uses only a few thousand words in everyday speech while the very educated may
use 30,000 to 60,000 words.
According
to I Hear America Talking, a 1976 book by Stuart Berg Flexner, the four
most common words spoken in English are I, you, the A. I and you accounted for 10% of all informal
conversation.
The
American Heritage Word Frequency book of 1971 said the top 10 most commonly
written words were all three or few letters long. “That” was the longest word used.
Home to Dead Writers
Paris’s
Pere Lachaise Cemetery houses the remains of many literary greats, including
Moliere, Colette, Daudet, Romains, Provst, Balzac, Apollinaire, Abelard and
Heloise. The brilliant writers rest all over the place. At Cambridge, Massachusetts in Mount Auburn
Cemetery, we can find Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Bartlett and Amy
Lowell. In London’s Highgate Cemetery
you’ll find buried Karl Marx, George Eliot, Coleridge, and Mrs. Henry
Wood. Other cemeteries housing literary
heavyweights include Sleepy Hollow Cemetery (Concord, MA), Forest Hills
Cemetery (Boston), and Bunhill Fields (London).
The Novo-Divichy Cemetery in Moscow houses Chekhov, Gogol, Lenin,
Stalin, and John Reed. The Woodlawn
Cemetery in New York houses Melville, Victor Herbert, George M. Cohan, and
Nellie Bly.
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