From the ridiculous (50 Shades of Grey is Britain’s best-selling book of all time?!) to the shocking (Nabokov’s wife prevented him from burning the unfinished drafts of Lolita!), I love reading interesting facts and trivia about writers and books.

In this list from Buzzfeed, I was sitting wide-eyed the entire time I read the list.

I loved finding out the (horrible) original title of Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. And the fact that Dan Brown used to be a pop singer…WTF? This is a great listing and I found a few other juicy tidbits in addition.

Here are a few other facts I discovered:

William Shakespeare invented the word “hurry.”
Oh, and think about this one for a second: John Wayne once recited Shakespeare in a contest…and won!
Tolstoy wrote War and Peace before there were computers or copying machines. His poor (devoted!) wife had to copy his manuscript by hand seven times.
If you can imagine this: Arthur Conan Doyle, the author of the Sherlock Holmes stories, was actually an eye doctor, an ophthalmologist. Since specialty medical practices were very difficult to build in his day – and didn’t pay well – he ended up having to take up writing to make ends meet.
The first published book ever written on a typewriter was The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Mark Twain used a Remington in 1875.
The world’s most expensive book ever purchased was bought by Bill Gates at auction for $30.8 million dollars. The title of the book is Codex Leicester by Leonard da Vinci.
Margery Williams – author of The Velveteen Rabbit – wrote a horror novel called The Thing in the Woods under the pseudonym Harper Williams. The story, about a werewolf and his more human brother, supposedly inspired H.P. Lovecraft’s short story The Dunwich Horror.
Before striking it big as a children’s author, Dr. Seuss made propaganda films for the Army during WWII.
Don Quixote is the best-selling novel of all time, with over 500 million copies sold.

 

Do you love trivia? Share it in the comments!

 

Sources:
http://wattpad.tumblr.com/post/1518202924/interesting-facts-about-books

http://thefw.com/amazing-facts-about-childrens-books-authors/