1. The world’s largest book is the so-called “Super Book,” published in 1976 in the American town of Denver, Colorado. It has three hundred pages. The book weighs more than 250 kilograms. Its length and width are 3.07 and 2.74 meters, respectively.
2. The most voluminous multi-volume edition is called the 1112-volume collection of British parliamentary documents. The work was published in 1968-1972 by the University of Ireland, weighing 3.3 tons and costing 50,000 pounds sterling. If one devoted ten hours daily to reading it, it would take six years to read it completely. The multi-volume set came out in an edition of 500 copies. The cost per multi-volume set for 1987 was £9,500.
3. The Deutsches Warterbuch by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm is the largest of all the world’s dictionaries. Its 33 volumes contain 3,4519 pages. It was 117 years in the making, from 1854 to 1971. Today its value is estimated at 5,425 German marks. The Oxford English Dictionary in 20 volumes and 21728 pages is larger than any other English dictionary.
In 1981 McMillan published The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, edited by Stanley Sadie. Its 20 volumes contain 4,500 illustrated pages and more than 22 million words. This gigantic edition represents specialized vocabulary literature. In 1987 it cost 1,100 pounds sterling.
4. Fans of children’s books will be interested to know that the tiniest children’s book is 1×1 mm in size. This is the fairy tale “Old King Cole.” It was released on paper with a density of 22 mm per 1 meter/square meter. The print run was 85 pieces. To turn the book pages you will need a thin needle. The unique edition was published by the Scottish publisher Gleniffer Press.
5. The longest novel is a book by the French writer Jules Romain, Men of Goodwill. Twenty-seven volumes of the novel were published between 1932 and 1946. The English version was shorter and took only 4959 pages in 14 volumes.
The table of contents of the book is 100 pages long. In total, the novel contains 2 million 70 thousand words.
The book “Tokugawa Ieyasu” by the Japanese author Sohachi Yamaoka was once published through daily newspaper publications. If all the chapters of the novel were put together, it would take 40 book volumes.
6. It was published since 1935, and contains 165 million 200 thousand words. In August 1983, the price of the encyclopaedia was $2,325, and the volume was 104 volumes.
7. It was published in Scotland in 1768. Then the reprinting rights were bought by American booksellers. It was later taken over by the University of Chicago, located in Illinois, USA. The present edition of Britannica is the fifteenth. Its 32 volumes consist of 32330 pages and 44 million words.
8. Its 75 volumes are 172.3 kilograms. It has 131,445 pages and 23,948,253 articles.
