1. Reading is considered to be the best exercise for your brain and more than that: it reduces your stress levels, you learn something new every day, it maintains your memory and helps in preventing Alzheimer, and also is statistically the cheapest hobby you could find. 2. No matter how popular they are, the most famous tales from the Arabian Nights cycle are not in the original manuscripts. So Ali Baba, Aladdin and Sindbad are much later additions to the stories, and despite of becoming so well known there are voices who still consider them "false" and not belonging in there.
3. Among book thieves the legend - at least when it comes to the US - is surely Stephen Blumberg from Iowa, who managed to steal more than 23 000 books, through various means, most of these from the collections of over 250 libraries. Blumberg is so obsessed by books that he didn't hesitate to break and enter, cheat, lie, manipulate or simply steal in order to get his hands on the titles that he was passionate about.
4. There is a Japanese word, tsundoku, that could be translated as "buying many books and never having the time to read them". Somewhat descriptive for many reading aficionados.
5. In the past some used to place the books on shelves backwords, with the spine facing the back of the bookshelf, and also in libraries books were chained as not to be stolen. On the other hand at that time, in the Middle Ages and even in the first decades after Gutenberg, books were so expensive that they were literally treasures.
6. The most banned books in the USA are still the Harry Potter series.
7. E.B. White was inspired in writing Charlotte's Web, one of the most popular children books of all times, by the many spiders in his own home.
8. During his school years Roald Dahl had the chance of being a taste tester for Cadbury chocolate. No wonder he later wrote about Willy Wonka.
9. Only about 2% of the more than 1.2 million titles that are published every year end up selling more than 500,000 copies.
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