Books Breaking Barriers!

Did you know 129,864,880 books have been written up until now? Books have been around for a long time. With books being so old and so large in quantity there are numerous world records that have been set. Some of the world records are hard to believe!

“In Search of Lost Time,” otherwise known as “Remembrance of Things Past,” by Marcel Proust holds the record for the longest book in the world! The original book was written in French and published in 1913. What is the word count, you may ask? 1,267,069 words, or, 9,609,000 characters! Why is the book so long? As stated in the article “In Search of Lost Time” by Britannica, the book is about the author’s own experiences intertwined with his claim that there is no meaning in the world. There are seven volumes in total. Proust was particularly curious about time, specifically the loss of it. The book, as you can imagine, took so long to write that even after Proust’s death his brother published three drafts of the seven volumes. As a result of those three drafts not being perfected by Proust himself, there are some “unpolished” passages. Needless to say, a seven-volume book is very impressive–do you think you could write one?

If you’re looking to buy a book on the more expensive side, “The Codex Leicester” is your book. In a CNBC article, “Bill Gates paid $30.8 million for this book 25 years ago-here’s why it still inspires him today,” more information about the journal was revealed. Being bought by Bill Gates, a Microsoft co-founder, in 1994 for $30.8 million, it has been labeled one of the most expensive books. Why would anyone pay such a price? Well, it is Leonardo Da Vinci’s science diary after all. Yes, the Leonardo Da Vinci. The journal contains scientific writing about bodies of water as well as the relationship between the sun, Earth, and the moon. It’s a decent sized journal, 71 pages in fact. All in Italian, of course. The journal itself is said to be very unorganized as its main purpose was to store brainstorming ideas.

I know I’m not the only one who has wondered what book has been read the most. The answer? The Bible. Insider’s article, “How the Bible has changed over the past 2,000 years,” claimed that over the last 50 years 3.9 billion copies of the Bible were sold. It is the most well known book. It had to be translated into different languages so it’s been labeled as the most distributed book in the world. The Bible is the Holy Scripture of Christian religion and it has about 1,200 pages. According to “Average amount of time spent reading the Bible among adults in the United States from 2013 to 2017,” an article by Statista, in 2017, Americans, on average, read the Bible for 30-44 minutes. The Bible is available almost everywhere. In some houses it is the most valuable object. With people reading Bibles for a good chunk of time and also buying them in bulk, it is no wonder why the Bible is the most read book.

Books are pretty great. There is always a book for everyone because they’re so entertaining to read! Books also hold many impressive world records, like the ones mentioned above. I wonder what new book records will be made in the future? What records will be broken?