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

capita than any other people in the world.
    During the eighteenth century, books that were considered offensive were sometimes “punished” by being whipped.
    The all-?time bestselling electronic book is Stephen King’s Riding the Bullet.
    The only person to decline a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction was Sinclair Lewis for his book Arrowsmith.
    Roger Ebert is the only film critic to have ever won the Pulitzer Prize.
    Tom Sawyer was the first novel written on a typewriter.
    Samuel Clemens, aka Mark Twain, smoked forty cigars a day for the last years of his life. He was born in 1835 when Halley’s Comet appeared. He died in 1910 when Halley’s Comet returned.
    Ghosts appear in four Shakespearian plays: Julius Caesar, Richard III, Hamlet, and Macbeth.
    World heavyweight boxing champion Gene Tunney also lectured on Shakespeare at Yale University later in his life.
    Shakespeare spelled his own name several different ways.
    Goethe couldn’t stand the sound of barking dogs and could only write if he had an apple rotting in the drawer of his desk.
    For the 66 percent of Americans who admit to reading in the bathroom, the preferred reading material is Reader’s Digest.
    Ernest Vincent Wright wrote the fifty-?thousand-?word novel Gatsby without any word containing “e.”
    The original Aladdin story from Tales of 1001 Arabian Nights begins, “Aladdin was a little Chinese boy.”
    Dr. Seuss pronounced his name so it would rhyme with rejoice. His birthday is March 2.
    Dr. Seuss coined the word nerd in his 1950 book If I Ran the Zoo.
    Sherlock Holmes’s archenemy was Professor Moriarty. Holmes had a smarter brother named Mycroft.
    Sherlock Holmes never said, “Elementary, my dear Watson.”
    Writer Edgar Allan Poe and LSD-?advocate Timothy Leary were both kicked out of West Point.
    Isaac Asimov is the only author to have a book in every Dewey decimal category.
    Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis was the most famous editor at Doubleday & Co.
    Hans Christian Anderson, author of many famous fairy tales, was word-?blind. He never learned to spell correctly, and his publishers always found errors in his manuscripts.
    Dr. Jekyll’s first name is Henry.
    Charles Dickens never finished his schooling. He was also an insomniac, who believed his best chance of sleeping was in the center of a bed facing directly north.

BIBLE TALK
    Almost all the villains in the Bible have red hair.
    The last word in the Bible is Amen.
    The longest chapter in the Bible is Psalms 119.
    There are more than 1,700 references to gems and precious stones in the King James Version of the Bible.
    The Bible is the number-?one shoplifted book in America.
    The book of Esther in the Bible is the only book that does not mention the name of God.
    The term devil’s advocate comes from the Roman Catholic Church. When deciding if someone should be sainted, a devil’s advocate is always appointed to give an alternative view.
    The Bible has been translated into Klingon.
    It is believed that Shakespeare was forty-?six around the time the King James Version of the Bible was written. In Psalms 46, the forty-?sixth word from the first word is shake, and the forty-?sixth word from the last word is spear.
    Every minute, forty-?seven Bibles are sold or distributed throughout the world.
    According to Genesis 1:20–22, the chicken came before the egg.
    All Hebrew-?originating names that end with the letters “el” have something to do with God.
    A seventeenth-?century Swedish philologist claimed that in the Garden of Eden God spoke Swedish, Adam spoke Danish, and the serpent spoke French.
    ARE YOU AFRAID OF THE DARK?
    A phonophobe fears noise.
    Carcinomaphobia is the fear of cancer.
    Paedophobia is a fear of children.
    Nyctohylophobia is the fear of dark wooded areas, or forests at night.
    Pyrophobia is the fear of fire.
    Taphephobia is the fear of being buried alive.
    Telephonophobia is the fear of telephones.
    Papaphobia is the fear of popes.
    Nycrophobia is the fear of