My Top 3 World Book Facts for World Book Day

1. The world’s smallest book is Teeny Ted from Turnip Town about Teeny Ted’s victory in the Turnip contest at the annual Turnip Town fair. It measures 0.07 mm by 0.10mm and was published in April 2007 by Robert Chaplin at the Nano Imaging Facility of Simon Fraser University in Canada... but if you want to read it you’ll have to use a scanning electron microscope.

2. The world’s largest book is Bhutan: A Visual Odyssey Across the Kingdom by Michael Hawley from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It measures 1.5 metres by two metres. The limited edition book was sold for $10,000 a copy with profits going to the charity he founded, Friendly Planet.

[Recently it was claimed that the Klencke Atlas was the world’s largest book but that has been changed to the world’s largest Atlas which is on display in the British Library and is 1.75m high and 1.9m wide.]

3. The world’s best-selling book is The Bible with an estimated 6 billion sales. This is followed not very closely by Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung with around 900 million copies sold.

Enjoy your World Book Day activities and long may we have real books with a cover to open, pages to turn and that wonderful smell of new paper only rivalled by the fresh coffee aroma from the mug that we cuddle as we snuggle down to read.