121 Fun Facts About Book

From which Old English word does 'book' come?

Boc was the Old English word; German Buch and Dutch boek are cousins from the same Germanic root, not ancestors, while Rome's liber lives on in 'library'.

Roughly how many unique books had been published in total, by Google's 2010 estimate?

Around 130 million: Google's engineers boiled nearly a billion raw catalogue records down to 129,864,880 books, throwing out duplicates, maps, microforms and a turkey probe someone had catalogued as an April Fools' joke.

The bound book overtook the scroll in the Roman world partly because which group adopted it from the second century on?

Early Christians preferred bound pages for their scriptures while most other literature stayed on rolls: one volume could hold all four Gospels, when Matthew alone nearly filled a scroll.

Which fantasy classic began as a single line scribbled by an Oxford professor on a blank exam paper he was marking?

The Hobbit began as one sentence about a hole in the ground, jotted on a blank exam page; Tolkien spun it into a story for his children and passed it round friends, and no publisher saw it until 1936.

Which novel opens with the sentence 'Call me Ishmael'?

Moby-Dick opens with its narrator's three-word introduction, yet the whaling epic flopped in 1851: it sold fewer than 4,000 copies in its author's lifetime and won its fame only in the 20th century.

Which series of novels has sold more than 600 million copies worldwide?

Harry Potter has sold more than 600 million copies in over 80 languages, yet the first hardback printing of the first book in 1997 ran to just 500 copies, most of them sent to libraries.

Which London publisher accepted J. K. Rowling's first novel after twelve others had turned it down?

Bloomsbury said yes after its founder, Nigel Newton, took a chapter home to his eight-year-old daughter Alice, who read it and demanded more.

Which novel, published in two parts in 1605 and 1615, is often called the first modern novel?

Don Quixote gained a fake sequel from a rival in 1614, so in the real second part the knight changes his route to prove the forgery false and even meets one of its characters.

Which book became the world's most translated non-religious book in 2017?

The Little Prince reached its 300th language in April 2017 with Hassanya, a Saharan dialect of Arabic; the French classic first appeared in New York in 1943, as its exiled author's books were banned at home.

Who is the best-selling novelist of all time, with more than two billion copies sold?

Agatha Christie has sold an estimated two billion books, and it began with a dare: her sister Madge challenged her to write a detective story, which became The Mysterious Affair at Styles.

Which Charles Dickens novel, set during the French Revolution, is often claimed as one of the best-selling novels ever?

A Tale of Two Cities began in the very first issue of Dickens's own new weekly, All the Year Round, and ran for 31 instalments in 1859; sales of 200 million have been claimed for it since.

Which Chinese title, the 'Little Red Book', has print estimates of up to 6.5 billion?

Quotations from Chairman Mao began in 1964 as a handbook for soldiers, its first run handed out only inside the army; the Cultural Revolution then made it the most printed book of its time, with well over a billion copies.

Which woodblock-printed scroll, dated 11 May 868, is the oldest dated printed book?

The Diamond Sutra sat in a cave library near Dunhuang that was sealed about a thousand years ago and reopened only in 1900; the explorer Aurel Stein bought the scroll there in 1907 and it is now in London.

What dedication ends the oldest dated printed book, a Chinese scroll of 868?

'For universal free distribution': a man named Wang Jie had the scroll made on behalf of his two parents, since in Buddhist belief copying the Buddha's words and giving them away earned merit.

Who invented movable type around 1040 AD, using ceramic characters?

Bi Sheng baked clay characters hard and set them in an iron frame on a bed of resin and wax; he is known only because the scholar Shen Kuo wrote the method down in his Dream Pool Essays.

The Jikji of 1377, the oldest surviving book printed with movable metal type, was made in which country?

Korea printed the Jikji, a Buddhist anthology, at Heungdeok Temple 78 years before Gutenberg's Bible; its one surviving volume is in Paris, bought in Seoul by a French diplomat and taken home.

What was Johannes Gutenberg's trade before he developed the printing press around 1440?

Gutenberg was a goldsmith by trade; his experience with metal alloys and punch-cutting helped him cast the uniform lead-based type that made his press practical around 1440.

In which city did Gutenberg print his Bible in the 1450s?

Mainz was Gutenberg's home city, but the Bible brought him ruin there: his backer Johann Fust sued over the loans in 1455, and the court handed Fust the printing workshop.

In which language is the text of the Gutenberg Bible printed?

Latin: Gutenberg printed the Vulgate, the medieval Church's own version, and its columns of 42 lines give the book its other name, the 42-line Bible.

Who set up England's first printing press, at Westminster in 1476?

William Caxton learned the craft in Cologne and printed the first book in the English language abroad, in Bruges, before he brought a press home to Westminster.

What is a book printed in Europe before 1501 called?

An incunable takes its name from incunabula, the Roman word for swaddling clothes or a cradle, because such books date from the infancy of printing; the cut-off at 1500 is an arbitrary round date.

Which Venetian printer introduced italic type in 1501 and used a dolphin-and-anchor device?

Aldus Manutius had his punchcutter Francesco Griffo cut the slanted letters to imitate the handwriting of Italian scholars, and first used them in a 1501 edition of Virgil.

Which punctuation mark debuted in Pietro Bembo's De Aetna, printed in Venice in the 1490s?

The semicolon first appears in De Aetna, printed in the mid-1490s; its printer went on to help settle the way both it and the comma are used.

What was the first book printed in British North America, in 1640?

The Bay Psalm Book's verse was so unpolished that none of it stayed in use, yet in 2013 one of the eleven surviving copies, sold by Boston's Old South Church, fetched $14.2 million.

Who bought Leonardo da Vinci's Codex Leicester for $30.8m in 1994?

Bill Gates bought it at an auction that billed it as the Codex Hammer, the name its previous owner, Armand Hammer, had tried to give it; the older name Leicester is the one that lasted.

What is the main subject of Leonardo da Vinci's notebook the Codex Leicester?

The movement of water fills most of its 72 pages, but Leonardo also uses the notebook to argue that fossil shells lie on mountains because the peaks were once sea bed.

Which Holy Roman Emperor, fascinated by alchemy, reportedly bought the Voynich manuscript for 600 ducats?

Rudolf II's purchase is known from a letter of the 1660s found with the manuscript, which also passes on the belief that the book was the work of the English friar Roger Bacon.

Where has the Voynich manuscript been held since 1969?

Yale's Beinecke Library received it as a gift in 1969 from the dealer Hans P. Kraus, who had paid $24,500 for it and then spent years failing to find a buyer at $160,000.

Which dystopian novel imagines 'firemen' whose job is to burn books?

Fahrenheit 451 took shape in the basement of a UCLA library, where Ray Bradbury fed a rented typewriter ten cents for every half hour to escape a small house full of young children.

What is the largest extant medieval illuminated manuscript, nicknamed the Devil's Bible?

The Codex Gigas owes its nickname to a full-page portrait of the Devil and a legend that one monk wrote it in a single night with his help; Swedish troops took it from Prague as war booty in 1648.

Where is the Book of Kells on display?

Trinity College Library, Dublin, has held it since 1661: when Cromwell's cavalry was quartered in the church at Kells, the town's governor sent the book to Dublin for safety, and a bishop later gave it to the college.

What material are the leaves of the Book of Kells made from?

Calfskin vellum: the leaves are fine calf hide, and the word vellum itself comes from the Old French for calf, the same root that gives English 'veal'.

Ancient Egyptian writing sheets were made from the pith of which kind of plant?

A wetland sedge, Cyperus papyrus, once grew thick in the Nile Delta; Egyptians sliced its pith into strips and pressed two layers together at right angles, and its name gave English the word 'paper'.

Which ancient city gives its name to the writing material made from prepared animal skin?

Pergamon gave parchment its name; a legend says the city invented it when its rival Alexandria cut off the papyrus supply, though skins had been written on long before.

What is the edge of a book's pages opposite the spine called?

The fore-edge can hide a secret: English binders of the 17th and 18th centuries painted scenes there that stay invisible under the gilt until the pages are fanned.

What is the stiff outside of a hardback book typically made of?

Board covered with cloth or paper makes a hardback more durable and dearer than a paperback; publishers usually release this edition first and hold the cheaper one back for months.

Who launched the Penguin paperback revolution in 1935 with ten reprint titles?

Allen Lane, the story goes, dreamed up his cheap paperbacks after finding nothing worth reading on the bookstall at Exeter station; he launched the first ten in 1935 with his brothers Richard and John.

Which seabird gives its name to the children's imprint that Penguin launched in 1940?

Puffin began with illustrated non-fiction proposed by the editor Noel Carrington, who was inspired by the bright, cheap lithographed books then being mass-produced for young Soviet readers.

Which US paperback imprint did Robert de Graff create in 1939 with Simon & Schuster?

Pocket Books, founded by Robert de Graff with Simon & Schuster in May 1939, was the first mass-market paperback imprint in the US; 'pocket book' became a North American synonym for paperback.

Which novel grew out of a ghost-story contest that Lord Byron proposed at a villa on Lake Geneva in 1816?

Frankenstein came to Mary Shelley after days of failing to think of a story, when she imagined a scientist horrified by the life he had made; the same contest produced the first modern vampire tale.

Which American publisher merged with Penguin in 2013?

Random House was named in 1927, when its founders, who ran a series of classic reprints, decided to publish a few other books 'on the side at random'; it merged with Penguin in 2013.

Which best-selling novelist testified for the US government in 2022 against the sale of his own publisher to a larger rival?

Stephen King took the stand in August 2022 against his own publisher, Simon & Schuster, and the judge went on to block its $2.2 billion sale.

Which letter can appear as the final character of an old ten-digit ISBN?

X stands in for the value ten: the last character of a ten-digit ISBN is a check value running from 0 to 10, and the 13-digit codes that replaced it never need the letter.

What is the 'S' in ISBN short for?

Standard: the International Standard Book Number grew out of a nine-digit code devised in the 1960s for the bookseller WHSmith, and its 13-digit form is now printed as the barcode on the back of a book.

Whose 1755 Dictionary of the English Language defined oats as a grain that in Scotland 'supports the people'?

Samuel Johnson promised to finish in three years and took more than twice as long, working with only clerical help; his dictionary defines a lexicographer as 'a harmless drudge'.

Do the e-book, paperback and hardback editions of the same book share one ISBN?

No, each edition gets its own: an ISBN identifies one specific product, so the hardback, paperback and e-book of a title each carry a different number.

What was the first name of the librarian who published his decimal classification in 1876?

Melvil Dewey was christened Melville; a keen spelling reformer, he trimmed the letters he thought redundant from his first name and for a time even spelled his surname 'Dui'.

Which industrialist paid for more than 2,500 public library buildings around the world between 1883 and 1929?

Andrew Carnegie gave a building only where the town supplied the site and pledged money every year for its upkeep; nearly 1,700 of his libraries went up in the United States.

Which Dewey class contains literature, including fiction?

The 800s are Dewey's home for literature, novels included, yet many libraries ignore the number for fiction and shelve it in a separate section by author's surname.

Which is the oldest federal cultural institution in the United States, founded in 1800?

The Library of Congress began in 1800 with $5,000 to buy books for lawmakers moving to the new capital; its first 740 volumes and three maps were ordered from London.

Whose private collection of 6,487 books was bought to replace the ones British troops burned in Washington in 1814?

Thomas Jefferson sold the nation his whole collection for $23,950 in 1815, but a second fire in 1851 destroyed about two-thirds of those books.

Which stone animals, nicknamed Patience and Fortitude, flank the Fifth Avenue entrance of the New York Public Library?

Lions: the pair were first called Leo Astor and Leo Lenox after the library's founders, until Mayor Fiorello La Guardia renamed them in the 1930s for the qualities New Yorkers needed to get through the Depression.

Karl Marx studied in which museum's Reading Room?

The British Museum housed the national library until a 1972 Act split it off as the British Library; readers went on using the round Reading Room until the move to St Pancras in 1997.

Which king's 65,000-volume collection sits in a glass tower inside the British Library?

George III's King's Library, some 65,000 volumes collected between 1763 and 1820, was given to the nation by George IV in 1823 and stands in a six-storey glass tower at the British Library.

Which writer, who ran Argentina's national library while going blind, imagined an infinite 'Library of Babel'?

Jorge Luis Borges was made director in 1955 just as his sight failed, and wrote a poem on the irony of being granted, at one touch, 'books and night'.

Which French king's 1537 decree ordered printers to hand a copy of every new book to the royal library?

Francis I issued the Ordonnance de Montpellier so that his library, then at the château of Blois, would gather every work worth keeping; France's legal deposit of books descends from it.

Which retired diplomat refounded Oxford University's library, which opened under his name in 1602?

Sir Thomas Bodley reopened the library in 1602 and in 1610 struck a deal with London's Stationers' Company to send it a copy of every book they registered, which kept its shelves growing.

Which Roman is said to have accidentally burned the Library of Alexandria in 48 BC?

Julius Caesar, besieged in Alexandria in 48 BC, set fire to ships in the harbour; the blaze spread and, by tradition, burned part of the Library of Alexandria, which survived or was rebuilt afterwards.

In which city did the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, named for the city's patron saint Ambrose, open to the public in 1609?

Milan's great library was stocked by agents whom its founder, Cardinal Federico Borromeo, sent across Europe and as far east as Syria to buy books and manuscripts.

What powered Maryland librarian Mary Titcomb's travelling library in 1905?

A team of horses pulled her book wagon, with the library's janitor at the reins; a freight train smashed it at a rail crossing in 1910, and its replacement was a motor truck.

Which country singer founded the Imagination Library, which mails free books to children from birth to age five?

Dolly Parton started it in 1995 in her home county in Tennessee as a tribute to her father, who never learned to read; by 2003 it had mailed its first million books.

The first Little Free Library was designed to look like what?

A one-room schoolhouse: its builder made the little box in 2009 as a tribute to his late mother, a teacher who loved to read, then set it on a post in his front yard and filled it with books to share.

On Catalonia's Sant Jordi festival, books are traditionally exchanged with which flower?

Roses: on Sant Jordi's day, 23 April and now World Book Day, Barcelona fills with book and flower stalls, and by tradition men gave a rose and received a book in return; the same date marks Shakespeare's death in 1616.

Which author did Spain's original Book Day, first held in 1926, honour?

Spain's Día del Libro, proposed by Valencian writer Vicente Clavel and first held in 1926, honoured Miguel de Cervantes; it moved from his presumed birthday, 7 October, to the date of his death in 1930.

Which publishing term did humorist Gelett Burgess popularise through a joke character, 'Miss Belinda'?

Blurb took off when Gelett Burgess wrapped his book Are You a Bromide? in a joke jacket showing 'Miss Belinda Blurb in the act of blurbing', sending up the gushing jackets publishers put on novels.

Whose praise did Walt Whitman stamp in gold on the spine of Leaves of Grass?

Whitman stamped Ralph Waldo Emerson's line 'I greet you at the beginning of a great career' in gold on the spine of the 1856 second edition of Leaves of Grass, without asking Emerson's permission.

Which 1925 novel's dust jacket shows a woman's eyes and lips floating above the bright lights of a carnival?

The Great Gatsby's jacket, painted by Francis Cugat, was ready before the novel was finished; Fitzgerald begged his editor not to give it to anyone else because he had 'written it into the book'.

Which phrase traditionally heads a bookplate marking a book's owner?

Ex libris means 'from the books of'. The printed bookplate began in 15th-century Germany, and owners soon hired artists as grand as Albrecht Dürer to engrave theirs.

Which traditional book format, made by folding each printed sheet just once, gives the largest pages?

Folio pages come from sheets folded just once; Shakespeare's First Folio of 1623 used the format and saved 18 plays, Macbeth among them, that had never been printed before.

How does a foreword conventionally differ from a preface?

It is signed by someone other than the author, while a preface is the author's own. The word, perhaps modelled on German Vorwort, gave English a home-grown twin for the older 'preface'.

What is the term for a book printer that authors pay to publish their own work, also called a subsidy publisher?

A vanity press makes its profit from the author's fee, not from sales to readers, so it has little reason to edit or market the book; a trade publisher earns only when copies sell.

Which mystery series carries the author name Carolyn Keene, a pseudonym shared by many ghostwriters?

Nancy Drew's 'Carolyn Keene' was a house name of the Stratemeyer Syndicate; Mildred Wirt Benson wrote 23 of the first 30 mysteries, paid a flat fee for each.

Which novel topped America's annual best-seller list in both 1936 and 1937?

Gone with the Wind led the fiction list two years running; Margaret Mitchell had begun it in 1926 to relieve the boredom of being laid up with an injury.

Which magazine published America's first best-seller list, in 1895?

The Bookman carried the list from its first issue, in February 1895; the magazine was itself an American copy of the London Bookman, launched four years earlier.

Whose weekly best-seller list began in October 1931 as a survey of bookshops in a single city?

The New York Times began with five fiction and four non-fiction titles from New York City shops; sued in 1983 over a book it left off, it argued the list was editorial judgment, not arithmetic, and the courts agreed.

Which Nobel laureate wrote four Oprah's Book Club picks?

Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon was the club's second pick, in 1996; when Winfrey chose The Bluest Eye in 2000, the novel sold hundreds of thousands more copies.

Which memoir chosen by Oprah's Book Club was exposed in 2006 as containing fabricated events?

A Million Little Pieces: The Smoking Gun exposed James Frey's fabrications in January 2006, and Oprah confronted him on air later that month.

Which novelist publicly bristled at his book The Corrections being an Oprah pick?

Jonathan Franzen: after he voiced unease about the Oprah logo on The Corrections in 2001, Winfrey withdrew his invitation to appear on the show.

Which book-review site, launched in 2007 so friends could see one another's bookshelves, did Amazon buy in 2013?

Goodreads began in founder Otis Chandler's living room after he caught himself scanning a friend's bookshelf for ideas; he wrote the code and his future wife, Elizabeth Khuri, wrote the words.

Which novel did Amazon remotely delete from Kindles in 2009?

Nineteen Eighty-Four vanished from Kindles along with Animal Farm because the seller had no rights to them; buyers were refunded, and newspapers compared the erasure to the 'memory hole' in the novel itself.

Which Amazon subsidiary developed the Kindle hardware?

Lab126, the Amazon hardware arm behind the Kindle, hides a pun in its name: 1 and 26 stand for A and Z, the first and last letters, echoing the A-to-Z arrow in Amazon's logo.

Which hit film's source novel first sold as a 99-cent Kindle e-book?

The Martian began as free chapters on Andy Weir's website; readers asked for a Kindle copy, he charged the 99-cent minimum, and more people bought it than had ever downloaded it free.

What did Michael Hart digitise to begin Project Gutenberg in 1971?

The US Declaration of Independence: Hart typed it into a University of Illinois Xerox Sigma V mainframe in 1971 and made it available to other users on the network.

Which nonprofit, home of the Wayback Machine, did four publishers sue in 2020 for lending scanned books?

The Internet Archive, founded by Brewster Kahle in 1996, had dropped its waiting lists during the 2020 lockdowns so that many readers could borrow one scan at once; the courts ruled against it.

What was the search giant's book-scanning programme first called when unveiled in October 2004?

Google Print was renamed Google Book Search in 2005, the year authors and publishers sued over its library scanning; a decade later an appeals court ruled the scanning fair use.

What was the term for recorded books in the 1930s, before 'audiobook'?

Talking book: the name came with a 1930s American scheme that pressed whole novels onto slow-turning 33 1/3 rpm discs, a speed the music industry settled on only with the LP in 1948.

Whose poems were the first release of audiobook pioneer Caedmon Records in 1952?

Dylan Thomas filled the first Caedmon record with poems, then padded side two with A Child's Christmas in Wales, a story so obscure he couldn't recall its title; it became one of his best-loved works.

Which French novel in seven parts holds the Guinness World Record for longest novel?

In Search of Lost Time runs to some 9.6 million characters by Guinness's count; publishers turned down its first part, so Marcel Proust paid to have it printed himself in 1913.

The Guinness Book of Records grew out of a brewery boss's argument over the fastest what?

Game bird: on a shooting party in Ireland, Sir Hugh Beaver argued over whether the golden plover or the red grouse was Europe's fastest, found no reference book could say, and saw that pubs needed one to settle such rows.

Which Salman Rushdie novel won the Booker Prize in 1981 and was later twice named the best of all its winners?

Midnight's Children won the 'Booker of Bookers' in 1993 and 'Best of the Booker' in 2008; Indira Gandhi sued over a single sentence, and Rushdie agreed to remove it.

Which novel won the Booker Prize in 2002?

Life of Pi was turned down by at least five London publishers before the small Scottish firm Canongate took it on; Yann Martel's novel then won the first Booker under Man Group sponsorship, worth a raised £50,000.

Which South African novelist was the first writer to win the Booker Prize twice?

J. M. Coetzee won in 1983 for Life & Times of Michael K and in 1999 for Disgrace, when he stayed away and his editor collected the prize; Carey, Mantel and Atwood later matched his double.

Which Mississippi novelist won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction twice, for A Fable and The Reivers?

William Faulkner wrote the plot outline of A Fable on the walls of his office at Rowan Oak, his Mississippi home; his second prize, for The Reivers, came in 1963, after his death.

Which Hemingway novel was denied a Pulitzer in 1941 after Columbia's president objected?

For Whom the Bell Tolls: the Pulitzer board favoured Hemingway's 1940 Spanish Civil War novel, but Nicholas Murray Butler objected and no fiction prize was given for 1941.

Which Russian novelist's omission from the first Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1901, drew a protest letter from Swedish writers?

Leo Tolstoy had not even been nominated when the French poet Sully Prudhomme won; Strindberg and Selma Lagerlöf were among the Swedes who wrote to him, and he later asked not to be chosen at all.

Who became the youngest Nobel Literature laureate, aged 41, in 1907?

Rudyard Kipling was 41 and the first English-language winner; he accepted the Nobel yet turned down a knighthood and the post of Poet Laureate.

Which philosopher declined the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1964?

Jean-Paul Sartre refused the 1964 prize, saying a writer should not let himself be turned into an institution; Pasternak had been forced to decline in 1958.

Which award, first given in 1922, was the world's first children's book award?

The Newbery Medal was the idea of Publishers Weekly editor Frederic Melcher, who paid for the medal himself; he wanted writing for children to earn the recognition given to poetry, plays and novels.

Which 1962 children's science-fantasy novel opens with the line 'It was a dark and stormy night'?

A Wrinkle in Time borrows that hoary opening with a wink; at least 26 publishers turned Madeleine L'Engle's novel down before it went on to win America's top children's book prize.

The Caldecott Medal recognises the previous year's most distinguished American what?

Picture book for children: the Caldecott Medal goes to the illustrator, not the author; it was proposed in 1937 because many felt picture-book artists deserved the honour that writers for children already had.

Which science-fiction award is named after the founder of Amazing Stories magazine?

Hugo Award: it honours Hugo Gernsback, founder of Amazing Stories, but 'Hugo' began as a nickname, and the official title stayed the Science Fiction Achievement Award until the 1990s.

Whose 1828 dictionary championed 'color' and 'center'?

Noah Webster did not invent 'color' or 'center' but chose them from spellings already in use; his bolder 'tung' for tongue never caught on.

Which verb had the longest entry in the second edition of the OED?

Set: its entry in the 1989 second edition ran to about 60,000 words and 430 senses; in the revised third edition the verb 'run' has since overtaken it.

In which city was the Encyclopaedia Britannica first published, from 1768?

Edinburgh: the first edition came out in weekly parts from 1768 and was largely the work of one 28-year-old editor, William Smellie, who said he had composed it 'with pastepot and scissors'.

Which reference work did physician Peter Mark Roget publish in 1852?

Thesaurus: Roget compiled his first word lists in 1805 to help his own writing and kept them private for nearly fifty years, finishing the book only after he retired from medicine.

Which city hosts the world's largest book trade fair, each October?

Frankfurt's fair was overtaken by Leipzig's in the 17th century and regained the lead only after 1949, when it was revived in West Germany with Leipzig cut off in the communist East.

Which American bookseller traces its origins to Arthur Hinds & Co, founded in 1886?

Barnes & Noble: Clifford Noble joined Arthur Hinds's New York shop as a clerk in 1886, rose to partner, then bought Hinds out in 1917 and went into business with William Barnes.

Who used a £6,000 WHSmith redundancy payout to found a British bookshop chain in 1982?

Tim Waterstone opened his first shop on London's Old Brompton Road with the £6,000 payout; eleven years later WHSmith, the firm that had let him go, bought the whole chain.

Eric Carle dreamed up The Very Hungry Caterpillar while toying with which office tool on a stack of paper?

A hole punch gave Carle the idea of a bookworm eating through pages; his editor suggested a caterpillar instead, and the die-cut book was first printed in Japan because doing it in America cost too much.

Which superhero first appeared in Action Comics #1 in 1938, five years after Famous Funnies pioneered the comic-book format?

Superman's creators, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, were paid $130 for that first 13-page story, $10 a page, and signed the character itself over to the publisher.

Which Japanese word describes buying books and letting them pile up unread?

Tsundoku is older than online book hauls: the word turns up in a Japanese text of 1879, apparently in a jab at a teacher who owned many books and read none.

Which German poet wrote, over a century before the Nazi bonfires, 'Where they burn books, they will ultimately burn people also'?

Heinrich Heine gave the line to a character in his play Almansor, about the burning of the Quran in Granada; in 1933 his own books went on the Nazi fire in Berlin, where the words are now set in the ground.

Which Chinese dynasty is notorious for burning books and burying scholars around 213 BCE?

Qin: on Li Si's advice the First Emperor is said to have burned histories and philosophy in 213 BCE while sparing books on medicine, farming and divination; the tale of 460 buried scholars was written down a century later.

Whose tale did Beatrix Potter print privately in 1901 after at least six publishers turned it down?

The Tale of Peter Rabbit first appeared as 250 black-and-white copies paid for by Potter; Frederick Warne, one of the firms that had rejected it, then published it in 1902.

Which institution kept the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, a list of banned books, from the 16th century until 1966?

The Catholic Church kept its Index for four centuries until Pope Paul VI abolished it; Hitler's Mein Kampf, examined by the censors for three years, was never placed on it.

Clay tablets from about 3200 BC, the forerunners of cuneiform, were found at the Mesopotamian city of Uruk in which modern country?

Iraq holds the site of Uruk, where the oldest tablets turned out to be office paperwork: tallies of barley and food rations kept by the city's administrators.

The word 'book' is thought to come from the name of which tree, perhaps because runes were once carved on its wood?

Beech: dictionaries call the link likely rather than proven, but the Romans made a similar leap, since their word for book first meant the inner bark of a tree.

Which hot-metal typesetting machine did Ottmar Mergenthaler patent in 1884?

Linotype let one operator at a keyboard cast a whole line of type as a single metal slug, replacing the compositor who set every letter by hand; the New York Tribune put the first one to work in 1886.

Which civilisation's folding bark-paper books, many burned by Spanish priests, survive in just four examples, one kept in Dresden?

The Maya wrote on paper made from the inner bark of a wild fig tree; Bishop Diego de Landa ordered many of the books destroyed in 1562, and only four are known to survive.

The long-playing book recordings pioneered in 1930s America were first made for which group?

Blind people, veterans of the First World War among them, were the audience: the American Foundation for the Blind developed the records, and a 1931 act of Congress funded a free national lending service.

What did Indian scribes rub into letters etched on palm-leaf manuscripts to make them legible?

Soot, as lamp black mixed with oil, was wiped across the leaf and stayed only in the scratched grooves; the rounded letters of scripts such as Odia and Tamil may have evolved because straight strokes could split the leaf.