60 Fun Facts About Reading

How many raised dots make up a full braille cell?

That gives 64 possible combinations, counting the empty cell used as a word space.

How old was Louis Braille when he first presented his tactile reading code in 1824?

Louis Braille was 15 when he presented his dot code in 1824, having been blinded at three by an awl accident in his father's harness workshop; the system was published in 1829.

Braille's code was an improvement on 'night writing', a tactile system invented by whom?

Charles Barbier, a French army captain, devised a 12-dot system of 'night writing' meant to let soldiers pass messages silently in the dark; Braille met it at the Paris institute in 1821 and cut the cell down.

What term did Émile Javal coin for the short, rapid jumps the eyes make while reading?

Saccades, from the French for 'jerks', was Émile Javal's 1879 term for the rapid jumps between fixations; contrary to earlier belief, the eyes do not glide smoothly along a line of text.

In his Confessions, Saint Augustine remarks on which bishop's then-unusual habit of reading silently?

Ambrose, bishop of Milan, read with his eyes while 'his voice and tongue were silent', Augustine wrote in Book VI; reading aloud was so much the norm that the habit seemed to need explaining.

Which teacher coined 'speed reading' and launched Reading Dynamics in Washington, D.C. in 1959?

Evelyn Wood, a Utah schoolteacher, opened her Reading Dynamics institute in Washington in 1959 after noticing that sweeping her hand down the page helped her eyes move faster; the term 'speed reading' is credited to her.

Roughly how fast do people read normally for comprehension?

Adults reading silently for comprehension average about 200–230 words per minute; a 2019 review of 190 studies put the mean at 238 for non-fiction, while skimming at 700 or more sacrifices understanding.

What is the name for loss of the ability to read after brain injury?

Alexia, or acquired dyslexia, is the loss of reading ability after brain damage, usually a stroke in the left hemisphere; Jules Dejerine described 'pure alexia' without loss of writing in 1892.

What material did Bi Sheng use for the first movable type, around 1040?

Porcelain, or fired clay, is what Shen Kuo's Dream Pool Essays records Bi Sheng using, baking each cut character hard and setting it in an iron frame; the oldest surviving book printed with metal type is Korea's Jikji of 1377.

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

Gutenberg printed the Bible in Mainz, on the Rhine, around 1454–55; of the roughly 180 copies made, 49 survive in substantial part and 21 are complete.

How many lines per page give the Gutenberg Bible its other name?

It is called the 42-line Bible: the earliest pages were set at 40 lines, then 41, before 42 lines per column became standard, apparently to save paper and vellum.

Which Buddhist text, printed on 11 May 868, is considered the oldest dated printed book?

The Diamond Sutra scroll, a Chinese translation bearing the date 11 May 868, was found in the Dunhuang caves in 1900 by the Daoist monk Wang Yuanlu and bought by Aurel Stein in 1907; it is in the British Library.

What is the name for the paged book format that gradually replaced the scroll in the ancient world?

The codex, pages bound along one edge, takes its name from Latin caudex, a tree trunk or wooden block; the poet Martial praised its convenience in the first century, and early Christians adopted it widely.

Before paper, the pages of early codices were typically parchment or vellum, made from what?

Parchment and vellum are animal hides — sheep, goat or calf skin — soaked in lime, scraped and stretched; vellum strictly means calfskin, and the word parchment comes from Pergamon in Asia Minor.

The first Penguin paperbacks of 1935 were sold through Woolworths for what price?

Penguins cost sixpence, the price of a packet of cigarettes; Allen Lane said the idea came from the dismal reading on sale at Exeter St Davids station, and a large Woolworths order rescued the launch.

Which German publisher's 1931 format, with colour-coded genre covers, did Penguin copy?

The Second World War cut the Albatross experiment short, but its standard size and typographic covers lived on.

Melvil Dewey developed his decimal classification in 1873 while working at the library of which college?

Dewey was a student assistant in the Amherst College library when he worked out the scheme in 1873; he published it anonymously in 1876, and by 2009 OCLC counted it in use in 200,000 libraries across 135 countries.

Whose 6,487 books did Congress buy to rebuild its library after the British burned Washington in 1814?

Thomas Jefferson sold Congress his 6,487 volumes in 1815 for $23,950; a fire in 1851 destroyed about two-thirds of them, and the library's main building, opened in 1897, carries his name.

The Bodleian Library, founded in 1602, is the main research library of which university?

The Bodleian is the University of Oxford's main research library, reopened by Sir Thomas Bodley in 1602 on the site of the medieval Duke Humfrey's Library; it is the UK's second-largest library after the British Library.

Which library, endowed by a merchant's will in 1653, is Britain's oldest free public reference library?

Chetham's Library in Manchester was endowed by the 1653 will of the merchant Humphrey Chetham as a free public library; Marx and Engels worked together at one of its reading desks in 1845.

The first modern tax-supported public library, opened in 1833, was in which small New Hampshire town?

Peterborough, New Hampshire, voted in 1833 to fund a town library from tax money, a first for the United States; Boston's public library was authorised in 1848, and Andrew Carnegie later paid for 1,689 American libraries.

Which Roman accidentally burned part of the Library of Alexandria during his civil war in 48 BC?

Julius Caesar set fire to ships in the harbour in 48 BC while besieged in Alexandria, and the blaze spread to buildings including part of the library; ancient estimates of its holdings run from 40,000 to 700,000 scrolls.

The Book of Kells, an illuminated Gospel book from around 800 AD, is on display at which library?

Trinity College Dublin has held the Book of Kells since the 1660s and shows it in its Old Library, with two of its calf-vellum volumes open at a time; the manuscript was made by Columban monks, probably on Iona.

How many digits has an ISBN had since the standard changed in 2007?

An ISBN has 13 digits: the old ten-digit code with a 978 prefix and a recalculated check digit; the scheme grew out of a nine-digit Standard Book Number devised for WHSmith in 1965.

In which year did Amazon launch the first Kindle e-reader?

The first Kindle went on sale on 19 November 2007 at $399 and sold out within hours; Amazon's Lab126 subsidiary developed it, and the larger-screened Kindle DX followed in 2009.

What was Amazon's internal codename for the original Kindle?

The Kindle name itself came from branding consultants Michael Cronan and Karin Hibma, who liked that it means to light a fire.

UNESCO's World Book Day, 23 April, was fixed on the death date of which author?

Miguel de Cervantes died in April 1616 and was buried on the 23rd, the date also given for Shakespeare's death; Spain first held its book day on 7 October 1926, his presumed birthday, moving it to 23 April in 1930.

On which date is International Literacy Day observed each year?

International Literacy Day is 8 September, proclaimed by UNESCO's General Conference in 1966 and first observed in 1967; the date recalls the opening of the 1965 Tehran conference of education ministers on eradicating illiteracy.

Which book has reportedly been translated into more languages than any other except the Bible?

The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's 1943 tale, had appeared in some 600 languages and dialects by 2024; only the Bible, available in well over 3,000 languages, outstrips it.

Which seven-volume French novel holds the Guinness World Record for longest novel?

In Search of Lost Time runs to some 1.2 million words across seven volumes published from 1913 to 1927; Proust paid Grasset to issue the first, Swann's Way, after the NRF turned it down.

What is the Japanese term for acquiring books and letting them pile up unread?

Tsundoku blends 'tsunde oku' (to pile up and leave) with 'doku' (reading); the pun dates from Meiji-era slang of the 1870s–80s and covers the unread books kept on the shelf 'for later'.

Who hosted Reading Rainbow throughout its 1983–2006 run on PBS?

LeVar Burton, then best known as Kunta Kinte in Roots, hosted every season; the show won 26 Emmys and a Peabody Award, and Burton later revived it as the Skybrary app.

In which year did Oprah Winfrey start her television book club?

Oprah's Book Club began in September 1996 with Jacquelyn Mitchard's The Deep End of the Ocean, which promptly topped the bestseller lists; Jonathan Franzen later bristled publicly at The Corrections being chosen in 2001.

Which James Frey memoir, an Oprah pick, was outed as largely fabricated?

A Million Little Pieces, Frey's 2003 addiction memoir, was exposed by The Smoking Gun in January 2006; Winfrey then confronted Frey and his publisher Nan Talese on a live episode.

How many different words does Dr. Seuss's The Cat in the Hat use?

The Cat in the Hat uses 236 different words, drawn from a first-grade vocabulary list, because Seuss was answering John Hersey's 1954 Life article attacking dull Dick and Jane primers; he later called it the book he was proudest of.

Bennett Cerf bet Dr. Seuss he couldn't write a book in how many distinct words?

Cerf wagered $50 that Seuss could not manage a book in 50 distinct words; Green Eggs and Ham (1960) did it, with 'anywhere' the only word of more than one syllable, and Cerf reportedly never paid.

The Dick and Jane readers of 1930–1965 taught reading by which method?

Dick and Jane taught by the whole-word (look-say) method, repeating a small sight vocabulary ('Look, look. See Spot run') until children recognised words on sight; Rudolf Flesch's 1955 Why Johnny Can't Read attacked the approach.

About how many copies of the McGuffey Readers were sold between 1836 and 1960?

About 120 million McGuffey Readers were sold between 1836 and 1960, a sales league shared only with the Bible and Webster's Dictionary; William Holmes McGuffey wrote the series while a professor at Miami University in Ohio.

Michael Hart founded Project Gutenberg, the oldest digital library, in 1971 by typing in which text?

Hart typed the US Declaration of Independence into the University of Illinois's Xerox Sigma V mainframe on 4 July 1971, after being handed a free printed copy at a grocery store, and offered it to other users on the network.

Todd Bol built the first Little Free Library in 2009 in Hudson, in which US state?

Hudson is in Wisconsin, on the St. Croix River opposite Minnesota; Bol shaped the box like a one-room schoolhouse as a tribute to his mother, a teacher, and the movement passed 100,000 registered libraries in 2020.

Dolly Parton's Imagination Library mails children a free book every month until what age?

Children receive a book a month from birth to age five, when they start school; the scheme began in 1995 in Sevier County, Tennessee, where Parton grew up, and passed 100 million books delivered in 2018.

Reading Is Fundamental was founded in 1966 by Margaret McNamara, wife of which US official?

Margaret McNamara was married to Robert McNamara, the Secretary of Defense under Kennedy and Johnson; she started Reading Is Fundamental as a project in Washington, D.C. schools, and by the 2020s it had given away more than 400 million books.

In which year did Amazon announce its acquisition of Goodreads?

Amazon announced the Goodreads deal in March 2013, buying the site Otis and Elizabeth Chandler had founded; the price was never disclosed, and the move drew criticism from rival booksellers and authors.

Which library activist founded Banned Books Week in 1982?

Judith Krug, director of the American Library Association's Office for Intellectual Freedom from 1967 until her death in 2009, launched Banned Books Week in 1982 after a surge in school and library challenges; it is held each autumn.

Which magazine, founded by the Wallaces in 1922, was for decades the world's best-selling?

Reader's Digest, launched by DeWitt and Lila Wallace in 1922 as a pocket-sized compilation of condensed articles, sold more copies worldwide than any other consumer magazine for much of the 20th century, with dozens of foreign-language editions.

The world's largest book trade fair is held each October in which German city?

Frankfurt's Buchmesse, held each October, was revived in 1949 in the city's Paulskirche and grew into the trade's largest gathering, with publishers from more than a hundred countries; Leipzig's spring fair is its smaller German rival.

What does the Latin phrase ex libris on a bookplate mean?

Ex libris means 'from the books of', marking ownership; the earliest known printed bookplates are German, including a hand-coloured woodcut pasted into books that Hildebrand Brandenburg gave to Buxheim monastery around 1480.

The oldest existing bookmark, a 6th-century Coptic leather strap, is held in which Dublin institution?

The Chester Beatty Library holds it: an ornamented leather bookmark, vellum-lined, once strapped to the cover of a Coptic codex from Egypt; the library grew from the collection of the mining magnate Chester Beatty, who settled in Dublin in 1950.

Which institution co-founded the Talking Books programme with the American Foundation for the Blind in 1931?

The Library of Congress ran the scheme from 1931 under the Pratt-Smoot Act, with the American Foundation for the Blind producing the records; the 1932 test recordings included a chapter of Helen Keller's Midstream and Poe's The Raven.

Librarian Mary Titcomb pioneered the American 'book wagon' in 1905 in Washington County, in which state?

Washington County is in western Maryland; Titcomb, librarian of its free library in Hagerstown, sent a horse-drawn wagon of books out to outlying farms in 1905, and a motorised version followed in 1912.

What is the name for a compulsive obsession with collecting books?

Bibliomania was popularised by Thomas Frognall Dibdin's 1809 book Bibliomania; or Book-Madness, a mock-serious account of the collecting frenzy among wealthy English bibliophiles of the day.

Writing was invented by the Sumerians in southern Mesopotamia in roughly which period?

Proto-cuneiform tablets from Uruk date to about 3400–3200 BCE, inside the 3500–3000 BCE window; the script grew from a clay token system used for counting goods and was pressed into clay with a reed stylus.

The Dolch list of sight words for beginning readers was first published in which year?

Edward William Dolch published his 220 sight words in 1936 in The Elementary School Journal, drawn from children's books of the time; Edward Fry's rival Instant Words list followed in 1957 and was revised in 1980.

The English word 'book' is thought to derive from a Germanic root meaning which tree?

Old English bōc shares a root with bēce, 'beech', the traditional explanation being that early Germanic runes were cut into beechwood tablets; Old Norse bók and Old Saxon bōk are cousins, and Slavic bukva ('letter') is related too.

Which 1952 company, founded by two college graduates, is called the 'seed' of the audiobook industry?

Caedmon Records was started in New York in 1952 by Barbara Holdridge and Marianne Roney, two recent Hunter College graduates; its first LP had Dylan Thomas reading his poems, with A Child's Christmas in Wales filling the B-side.

In which decade did the term 'audiobook' come into use, as cassettes replaced records?

'Audiobook' came into use in the 1970s as cassettes began to replace records; the government's earlier term was 'talking book', and the Audio Publishers Association made 'audiobook' the industry standard in 1994.

What are the annual awards for audiobooks, first given by the Audio Publishers Association in 1996, called?

The Audies, presented annually by the Audio Publishers Association, honour narration and production across dozens of categories, including an Audiobook of the Year; the ceremony is often likened to the industry's Oscars.

Which president signed the 1800 act that founded the Library of Congress?

John Adams signed the act on 24 April 1800 as the government prepared to move to the new capital; it set aside $5,000 for books, and the first order from London brought 740 volumes and three maps.

On Christmas Eve 1851, a fire at the Library of Congress destroyed roughly how many books?

About 35,000 of the library's 55,000 volumes burned on 24 December 1851, including two-thirds of the founding collection Congress had bought in 1815; a faulty chimney flue was blamed, and the room was rebuilt in fireproof cast iron.

The horse-drawn Warrington Perambulating Library, an early mobile library, was set up in which year?

The Warrington Mechanics' Institute launched its horse-drawn perambulating library in 1858 to lend more of its books to enthusiastic local readers; it is usually cited as Britain's first mobile library.