The World's Greatest Book of Useless Information Read Online Free PDF

Texas was banned in the city Paris, Texas, shortly after its box-?office release.
    The skyscraper in Die Hard is the Century Fox Tower.
    The sound of E.T. walking was made by someone squishing her hands in jelly.
    The word mafia was purposely omitted from the Godfather screenplay.
    Dracula is the most filmed story of all time. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is second, and Oliver Twist is third.
    When the movie The Wizard of Oz first came out, it got bad reviews. The critics said it was stupid and uncreative.

THE NUMBERS GAME
    Smokey the Bear’s zip code is 20252.
    Dirty Harry’s badge number is 2211.
    Sleeping Beauty slept one hundred years.
    Approximately sixty circus performers have been shot from cannons. At last report, thirty-?one of them have been killed.
    There are twenty-?two stars surrounding the mountain on the Paramount Pictures logo.
    In 1938, Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel sold all rights to the comic-?strip character Superman to their publishers for $130.
    The number of the trash compactor in Star Wars is 3263827.
    Pulp Fiction cost $8 million to make. Of that amount, $5 million went to actors’ salaries.
    In an episode of The Simpsons, Sideshow Bob’s criminal number is 24601, the same as the criminal number of Jean Valjean in Les Misérables.
    All the clocks in the movie Pulp Fiction are stuck on 4:20.
    The longest film ever released was **** by Andy Warhol, which lasted twenty-?four hours. It proved, not surprisingly (except perhaps to its creator), an utter failure. It was withdrawn and re-?released in a ninety-?minute form as The Loves of Ondine.
    The longest Hollywood kiss was from the 1941 film You’re in the Army Now; it lasted three minutes and three seconds.
    A Chinese checkerboard has 121 holes.
    There are 225 spaces on a Scrabble board.
    There are one hundred squares on a Snakes and Ladders board.
    The total number of bridge hands possible is 54 octillion.
    There are 311,875,200 five-?card hands possible in a fifty-?two-?card deck of cards.
    The wheel on the game show Wheel of Fortune is 102 inches in diameter.
    John Travolta’s white suit from Saturday Night Fever was auctioned off for $145,500; Judy Garland’s ruby slippers for $165,000; Charlie Chaplin’s hat and cane for $211,500; Elvis’s jacket for $59,700; and John Lennon’s glasses for $25,875.

THE LITERARY WORLD

PAGE TO SCREEN
    Bambi was originally published in 1929 in German.
    General Lew Wallace’s best-?seller Ben-?Hur was the first work of fiction to be blessed by a pope.
    The name for Oz in The Wizard of Oz was thought up when the author, L. Frank Baum, looked at his filing cabinet and saw A–N and O–Z, hence Oz.

THE USELESS INFORMATION BOOK CLUB
    An estimated 2.5 million books will be shipped in the next twelve months with the wrong covers.
    Louisa May Alcott, author of the classic Little Women, hated children. She only wrote the book because her publisher asked her to.
    Susan Haswell Rowson was America’s first bestselling novelist for her novel Charlotte Goode.
    During his entire lifetime, Herman Melville’s timeless classic of the sea, Moby Dick, only sold fifty copies.
    Guinness World Records holds the record for being the book most often stolen from public libraries.
    Lassie, the TV collie, first appeared in a 1930s short novel titled Lassie Come Home, written by Eric Mow-?bray Knight. The dog in the novel was based on Knight’s real-?life collie, Toots.
    In 1898 (fourteen years prior to the Titanic tragedy), Morgan Robertson wrote a novel called Futility. The plot of the novel turned on the largest ship ever built hitting an iceberg in the Atlantic Ocean on a cold April night.
    Keeping Warm with an Axe is the title of a real how-?to book.
    Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein at the age of nineteen.
    Virginia Woolf wrote all her books standing up.
    At twelve years old, an African man named Ernest Loftus made his first entry in his diary and continued every day for ninety-?one years.
    People in Iceland read more books per