Dearest readers,

This column is the last for the semester.  Parting is such sweet sorrow!  

The Librarian has a very important task for you, before we meet again: send me some new material!  Submit your questions to http://tinyurl.com/StumpOU or email me at [email protected]

If you don’t send questions, I will be forced to fill up this space by pontificating on matters of interest to me, and I am told that not everyone finds things like arcane details of medieval history or the intricacies of financial literacy to be fascinating.  Poor souls.

We’re going to end this semester with another question about books:

What is the longest book ever published, and how many pages was it?

This is again one of those questions for which The Librarian, should you be asking in person, would have several follow-up questions.  Are we talking single volume, or multi-volume?  Is this a book published in English, or any language?  

There are also two ways of looking at your question: longest book via physical size, or longest book via word count.  

Thinking about the question in terms of the longest book published in cubits, or whichever measuring system you choose, the page count will be dependent upon the content as well as how much can be stuffed between the covers without creating a spontaneous black hole.

For these types of questions, we have several books on book history (how very meta of us), and we have some trivia books.  For those interested in the general history of books and their development, The Librarian recommends:

Lyons, Martyn. 2011. Books: A living history. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum.  (call number: Z4 .L95 2011)

What we don’t currently have is a current copy of the Guinness Book of World Records (your public library would have that) but they are nice enough to share much of their information online: http://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/  If you do a keyword search for “book” there, you’ll find lots of interesting tidbits, such as:

The largest book measures 5 m x 8.06 m (16.40 ft x 26.44 ft), weighs approximately 1500 kg (3,306 lb) and consists of 429 pages. The book was unveiled by Mshahed International Group, in Dubai, UAE, on 27 February 2012.

An additional search for information on this in Library Onesearch reveals that the title of this book is This is Mohammad.  (“Largest book in the world at Arabian Centre.” Gulf News. (2013, May 8).)

If you’re thinking about word count, and you want to know the number of pages, you run into the problem of book editions having various page counts due to things as arbitrary as font size, page size, margin size, line spacing, and all those other tricksy adjustments that I’m sure none of you have ever played with in order to make your papers look longer than they actually are. 

 At this point I would give you the title of the longest book published according to word count, but…my word count is now up.

The Librarian would like to wish you all a very stress-free end of the semester.  

Please remember the library and librarians are always around to help you as you work on your final projects!