Wednesday, April 29, 2015

Fun Facts

This blog post is going to be an assortment of fun facts about libraries, books, and reading. I hope you learn something new from it!

  1. There are more public libraries than McDonald’s in the United States. 
  2. There are libraries around the world where you can check-out humans as a living book and listen to their stories. There are 150 such libraries around the world
  3. The Guinness Book of World Records holds the record for being the book most often stolen from public libraries
  4.  Haskell Free Library is built on the US/Canadian border. Exiting the library through the opposite entrance requires one to report to the country’s customs thereafter. 
  5. A 124,500 square foot abandoned Walmart in McAllen, Texas, has been turned into the largest single-floor public library in the United States.
  6. The Oakland Library in California maintains a “tool lending library” of 3500 tools to lend out to the community.
  7. When asked what book he’d like to have with him on a desert island, G. K. Chesterton replied, ‘Thomas’s Guide to Practical Shipbuilding.’
  8. Author James Frazer had to move out of his room at Great Court, London because the floor was threatening to give way under the weight of his books.
  9. The Japanese word ‘tsundoku’ means ‘buying a load of books and then not getting round to reading them’.
  10. Bibliosmia‘ is the enjoyment of the smell of old books.





Sources: http://www.kickassfacts.com/25-interesting-facts-about-libraries/
             http://interestingliterature.com/2015/03/05/30-interesting-facts-about-books/

3 comments:

  1. I have certainly experienced bibliosmia, and now I have a word for it. My favorite book when I was a kid was an old hardcover copy of Curious George, and it was largely because of the way it smelled. I still remember it. At the time, I thought it was what Curious George himself must have smelled like.

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  2. I have bibliosmia, and what can I say, it truly is a thing.

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  3. These are great! I don't think I knew any of them either, and I love learning new random facts! (:

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