Michael Bond bought Paddington Bear in 1956; he felt sad for the bear as it was the only toy left on the shop’s shelves on Christmas Eve. Please reach out to us to let us know what you’re interested in reading. Dickens believed that sleeping facing North, would improve his writing. The book is a handwritten copy of the original dictated manuscript, and reportedly sold for a record-setting $35 million. Noel Coward claimed he began every day by checking the obituary column in The Times; if he wasn’t listed there, he could get down to work. Franz Kafka would attend nudist camps but refused to drop his trousers; he was known by others as ‘The Man in the Swimming Trunks’. We hope you enjoy them! Robert Louis Stevenson legally gave his birthday away to a little girl. He also wrote a lot of his books in one of the huts. The firemen put Bradbury on hold while they burned a book, then reported back the temperature, and the rest is history. Aside from scoring book nerd points, these will also help you dominate on trivia night! F. Scott Fitzgerald once danced on the lawn of publishers Doubleday to attract Joseph Conrad; the caretaker noticed him and had him removed. While some letters are easier to avoid than others, E, T, and A are the most challenging to ignore. J. D. Salinger once dated Oona, the daughter of playwright Eugene O’Neill, but she left him for Charlie Chaplin whom she later married. Stephen King was once taken for a vandal in an Australian bookshop where he was secretly signing copies of his books. The US sitcom I Dream of Jeannie was created by Sidney Sheldon, who went on to become the seventh bestselling fiction writer of all time. at Mental Floss, Banned Books Quiz. The term was apparently coined by author Raymond Chandler in 1947, who when describing a particular book, said he “found it absolutely … unputdownable.”. He established the Stratemeyer Syndicate, which worked on the principle of having ghostwriters produce stories in a short period of time that the syndicate would sell to publishers. So many fun and interesting facts here! Here’s a selection of the most fun literary quizzes from around the interweb. Potter ended up printing 250 copies herself and distributing them to family and friends. and from right here at Book Riot, Who Said It? When he worked for Faber, T. S. Eliot liked to seat visiting authors in chairs with whoopee cushions and offer them exploding cigars. Roald Dahl’s school report read: ‘I have never met anybody who so persistently writes words meaning the exact opposite of what is intended.’. Friedrich von Schiller kept rotten apples in his desk. But when the novel was initially rejected by publishers, Jane Austen made significant rewrites, including a title change. Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code comes in at number 10 with 80 million sold, and the classic novel Don Quixote by Miguel Cervantes is number one with 500 million copies sold. And that’s it! The origin of the holiday is unknown, but Google records searches for “National Book Lovers Day” beginning in August 2007. After giving a report to a local newspaper there, it ran as a major scoop, and Salinger was so enraged that he rarely spoke publicly again. Maurice Sendak based the monsters in Where the Wild Things Are on his Polish relatives who lived with him after escaping the Holocaust. To celebrate the occasion, we’ve gathered together one hundred of our favourite facts about famous authors. Even though the cover is iconic, when Fitzgerald lent a copy of the book to Hemingway, he immediately disliked it. “A novel” still occasionally appears on modern works of fiction, partly out of tradition, and occasionally when the title and cover alone doesn’t make the subject clear. He claimed that he needed the scent of their decay to help him write. Poet William Ernest Henley was the inspiration for Long John Silver and the father of the girl who inspired the character Wendy Darling. Some of the most commonly banned/challenged books in history include 1984 by George Orwell, The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. In September, 2017, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints purchased the printer’s manuscript of The Book of Mormon. Amazon’s bestseller list is based on sales, and is updated hourly to reflect the top sellers on the site in close to real time. Mrs Beeton was only 21 when she began her Book of Household Management, which sold 2 million copies in its first decade. Pingback: 100 Interesting Facts about Famous Authors | ldbush21. The revisions were made between 1811 and 1812. A customer in the shop noticed a man walk in off the street and start signing books, and unaware that it was King, she notified the store staff. He is also thought to have used the word T-shirt for the first time. What an awesome list of literary snippets. We hold major institutions accountable and expose wrongdoing. Husbands hiding things from wives, mothers from children, and generation from generation. Stella Gibbons wrote much of her novel Cold Comfort Farm while commuting to work on the London Underground. They disapproved of the author’s use of talking animals in the book, and the Governor of the Hunan Province said: “Animals should not use human language, and it is disastrous to put animals and human beings on the same level.”. And do follow us @InterestingLit if you're also a tweeter.) But since Leo Tol­stoy’s polit­i­cal views clashed with that of the editor's, the first full issue of the novel was as a book. In some cases, it’s to publish and write something outside of their most well-known genre in an under-the-radar kind of way. at The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Quizzes about Literature From the Middle Ages to the 20th Century