The name Wendy was made up for the book Peter Pan, there was never a recorded Wendy before!
The name Oz, in The Wizard of Oz, was thought up when the creator, Frank Baum, looked at his filing cabinet and saw A-N and O-Z, hence "Oz".
The first novel ever written on a typewriter was The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
The letter "I" is used exactly 109 times in Act IV of Shakespeare's Macbeth.
In 1961, Matisse's
Le Bateau (The Boat) hung upside-down for 2 months in the Museum of Modern Art,
New York - none of the 116,000 visitors had noticed.
Picasso could draw
before he could walk and his first word was the Spanish word for pencil.
Sumerians invented
writing in the 4th century BC.
The first book
published is thought to be the Epic of Gilgamesh, written at about 3000 BC in
cuneiform, an alphabet based on symbols.
The first history
book, the Great Universal History, was published by Rashid-Eddin of Persia in
1311.
The first novel,
called The story of Genji, was written in 1007 by Japanese noble woman, Murasaki
Shikibu.
The Bible still is
the world's best selling book. More
In 1097, Trotula, a
midwife of Salerno, wrote The Diseases of Women - it was used in medical schools
for 600 years.
The world's longest
nonfiction work is The Yongle Dadian, a 10,000-volume encyclopaedia produced by
5,000 scholars during the Ming Dynasty in China 500 years ago.
Greek philosopher
Aristotle wrote Meteorologica in 350 BC - it remained the standard textbook on
weather for 2,000 years.
The first
illustrated book for children was published in Germany in 1658.
Barbara Cartland
completed a novel every two weeks, publishing 723 novels.
The word
"novel" originally derived from the Latin novus, meaning
"new."
A 18th century
London literary club was called Kit-Cat Club.
Ian Fleming's James
Bond debuted in the novel "Casino Royale" in 1952.
Johannes Gutenberg
is often credited as the inventor of the printing press in 1454. However, the
Chinese actually printed from movable type in 1040 but later discarding the
method. More
The Statue of
Liberty is the largest hammered copper statue in the world.
The largest statue
in the world is Mount Rushmore, the heads of four US Presidents carved into the
Black Hills near Keystone. The heads are 18 m (60 ft) tall.
The largest horse
statue in the world, the Zizkov Monument in Prague, stands 9 metres (30 ft)
tall.
If a statue of a
person on a horse has both front legs in the air, the person died in battle; if
the horse has one front leg in the air, the person died as a result of wounds
received in battle; if the horse has all four legs on the ground, like the
Zizkov Monument, the person died of natural causes.
The words
"Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" were penned in the 17th
century by English philospher John Locke.
To save costs, the
body of Shakespeare's friend and fellow dramatist, Ben Jonson, was buried
standing up in Westminister Abbey, London in 1637.
The first novel
sold through a vending machine - at the Paris Metro - was Murder on the Orient
Express.
Jean-Dominique
Bauby, a French journalist suffering from "locked-in" syndrome, wrote
the book "The Driving Bell and the Butterfly" by blinking his left
eyelid - the only part of his body that could move.
When Leonardo da
Vinci's Mona Lisa was stolen from the Louvre in 1912, 6 replicas were sold as
the original, each at a huge price, in the 3 years before the original was
recovered.
When Auguste Rodin
exhibited his first important work, The Bronze Period, in 1878 it was so
realistic that people thought he had sacrificed a live model inside the cast.
Rodin died of
frostbite in 1917 when the French government refused him financial aid for a
flat, yet they kept his statues warmly housed in museums.
Vincent van Gogh,
the world's most valued painter, sold only painting in his entire life - to his
brother who owned an art gallery. The painting is titled "Red Vineyard at
Arles."
Ernest Vincent
Wright's 1939 novel Gadsby has 50,110 words, none of which contains the letter
"e." See below
In 1816, Frenchman
J.R. Ronden tried to stage a play that did not contain the letter "a."
The Paris audience was offended, rioted and did not allow the play to finish.
The shortest stage
play is Samuel Beckett's "Breath" - 35 seconds of screams and heavy
breathing.
There are about 150
million sites on the web, with more than two billion web pages.
The world's
libraries store more than a 100 million original volumes.
The largest web
bookshop, Amazon.com, stores 2,5 million books.
The Library of
Congress, the largest library in the world, stores 18 million books on
approximately 850 km (530 miles) of bookshelves. The collections include 119
million items, 2 million recordings, 12 million photographs, 4 million maps and
53 million manuscripts.
2 billion people
still cannot read.
The problem of
missing teeth was first discussed at length in 1728 by Pierre Fauchard in his
book The Surgeon Dentist.
The first colour
photograph was made in 1861 by James Maxwell. He photographed a tartan ribbon.
The first English
dictionary was written by Samuel Johnson in 1755.
Noah Webster, who
wrote the Webster Dictionary, was known as a short, pale, smug, boastful,
humourless, yet religious man.
The first Oxford
English Dictionary was published in April 1928, 50 years after it was started.
It consisted of 400,000 words and phrases in 10 volumes. The latest edition
fills 22,000 pages, includes 33,000 Shakespeare quotations, and is bound in 20
volumes. All of which is available on a single CD.
When Jonathan Swift
published 'Gulliver's Travels' in 1726, he intended it as a satire on the
ferociousness of human nature. Today it is enjoyed as a children's story.