Literature
1.In 1961, Matisse's Le Bateau (The Boat) hung upside-down for 2 months in the Museum of Modern Art, New York (none of the 116,000 visitors had noticed).
2.The first history book, the Great Universal History, was published by Rashid-Eddin of Persia in 1311.
3.The first novel, called The story of Genji, was written in 1007 by Japanese noble woman, Murasaki Shikibu.
4.The world's longest nonfiction work is The Yongle Dadian, a 10,000-volume encyclopaedia produced by 5,000 scholars during the Ming Dynasty in China 500 years ago.
5.The first novel sold through a vending machine
(at the Paris Metro) was Murder on the Orient Express.
6.Jean-Dominique Bauby, a French journalist suffering from "locked-in" syndrome, wrote the book "The Driving Bell and the Butterfly" by blinking his left eyelid, the only part of his body that could move.
7.Vincent van Gogh, a valued painter, sold only one painting in his whole entire life. It was to his brother who owned an art gallery. The painting was "Red Vineyards at Arles."
8.Ernest Vincent Wright's 1939 novel Gadsby has 50,110 words, none of which contains the letter "e."
9.The first English dictionary was written by Samuel Johnson in 1755.
10.In Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's attempt to give his famous detective character an outlandish first name, Sherlock Holmes was almost called Sherrinford Holmes. Ultimately, Doyle named him after the Yorkshire bowler whom he played cricket against, Mordecai Sherlock.
11.Rembrandt van Rijn painted about 700 pictures.
12.Reportedly, Louisa May Alcott didn't want to write her classic novel, Little Women. She despised young girls and wrote the bestseller for the money.
13.Life on the Mississippi, written by Mark Twain in 1883, was the first novel ever to be written on a typewriter. Some of you may have thought Tom Sawyer, but good o Mark Twain remembered it wrong, since careful research by Twain historians has proven otherwise.
14.The name for Oz in the "The Wizard of Oz" was thought up when the creator, Frank Baum, looked at his filing cabinet and saw A-N and O-Z, hence "Oz."
15.The largest book in the world is known to be "The Golden Book of Cleveland," measuring five feet by seven feet, containing 6,000 pages for signatures and weighs about 2 and a half tons.
16.The author who wrote the most novels is a woman named Barbara Cartland, who wrote 723 novels.
17.The first children's book that was published in the United States was called Spiritual Milk for Boston Babes in wither England Drawn from the Breast of Both Testaments for Their Soul's Nourishment.
18.When the Titanic sank, the book that went down with it was "A gem encrusted copy," by Omar Khayyam.
19.The first American novel is The Power of Sympathy or the Triumph Founded in Truth, printed in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1798, written by William Hill Brown.
20.The world's largest art gallery is the Winter Palace and Hermitage in St. Petersburg, Russia. Visitors would have to walk 15 miles to see the 322 galleries which house nearly 3 million works of art.
21.The first American novel to sell one million copies was Harriet Beecher Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin," published in March 20, 1852.
22.A grand piano can be played faster than an upright piano.
23.Music notes come from Greek signs called neumes.
24.Peter Pan was first played as a play in London, England in December 27, 1904.
25.Bambi was first published in 1923 in Germany by Siegmund Salzmann written under the pen name of Felix Salten.
26.The world's smallest guitar is around 10 micrometers long, or about the length of a human cell. It has 6 strings about 50 nanometers wide, and when plucked, it would make a sound, unable to be heard with the human ear. It was made out of crystalline silicon in 1997 at Cornell University by Professor Harold Craighead and graduate student Dustin Carr.
27.A grand piano can open it's top in varying heights depending on the props. The highest top of a grand piano held open by props makes an angle of 57 degrees.
28.The fourth book in the popular series, "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire" holds the world record for the largest first-run printing at 4.8 million copies.
29.Before publishing Robert Louis Stevenson's story "Treasure Island", he orginally called it "The Sea Cook."
30.The oldest bookstore in the U.S. is thought to be the Moravian Book Shop in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, found in 1745. It occupies around 14,000 square feet and conatins roughly between 10,000 to 15,000 books.
31.Dr. Seuss (Theodor Seuss Geisel) wrote a total of 46 childrens' books. His first book, "And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street" (1937) was rejected 28 times before finding a publisher at Random House.
32.The first piano patent was granted to James Sylvanus McLean of New Jersey on May 27, 1796, for an "improvement in piano fortes."
33.The first American-born composer was Francis Hopkinson, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, who graduated in 1757 from the College of Philadelphia.
34.The first book for the blind was the Gospel of St. Mark, published in 1833 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania by the Pennsylvania Institution for the Instruction of the Blind.
35.Leonardo da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa on a piece of pinewood, 77 centimeter x 53 centimeter (30 inches x 20 7/8 inches) in the year 1506. It took him 4 years to finish it.
36.In 1473, just a few decades after the invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg, the first mechanically printed music, the Constance Gradual, is published in southern Germany.
37.John Calvin once ordered all organs (the musical instrument) to be removed from churches in the city of Geneva in 1536.
38.You all would know that the inventor of the grand piano is Bartolomeo Cristofori in the early 1700s, but it wasn't to around 1800 that Philadelphia instrument-maker John Isaac Hawkins invented the upright piano.
39.The first book auction in record was held in the Netherlands in 1599.
40.The first encyclopedic dictionary was the Lexicon Technicum, published in 1704.
41.The highest painting sold (at an auction) was The Portrait of Dr. Gachet, an oil paiting by Dutch Impressionist Vincent van Gogh, which was sold to Ryaei Saito at a Christie's auction in 1990 for $82.5 million.
42.The fairy story "The Sleeping Beauty" was wrote by French poet Charles Perrault in 1697, and was originally called "La Belle au bois dormant."
43.The largest collection of incunabula is in the Huntington Library in San Marinos, California, U.S.A.
44.A total of 23.3 million Harry Potter books were sold in the U.S. in the year 2000.
45.Grandma Moses, whose real name was Anna Mary Robertson, started painting in her late 70s. She was 80 years old when her first solo public show, at a New York City gallery, launched her career as a major artist. She died at age 101.
46.It has been speculated that when King James I of Englang hired 54 of the best writers and scholars in the country for a new English version of the Bible in 1604, William Shakespeare may have been among them. Although there is no conclusive evidence for participation in the project, it is nevertheless intriguing that the 46th word of the 46th psalm is "shake," and the 46th word from the end of the Psalm is "spear." Shakespeare, who was fond of cryptograms, was 46 years old at the time the version was completed. Either way, this is probably pure coincidence.
47.Yamaha, established in 1887, was the first piano manfacturer in Japan.
48.The worlds largest piano is a Challen Concert Grand, made by Challen. This piano is 11 foot 8 inch long, has a total string tension of over 30 tons, and weighs more than a ton.
49.The four strings of a violin, from left to right (thickist string to thinnest) is G, D, A, and E.
50.There are over 10 million pianos in American homes, businesses, and institutions.
51.The first violin was created by Andrea Amati in Cremona, Italy, around 1564.
52. The most expensive paintings ever stolen happened on April 14, 1991, in which 20 paintings, estimated to be worth $500 million dollars, were stolen from the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. 35 minutes later, they were found in an abandoned car not far from the museum.
53.The oldest known bible is the Codex Vaticanus, written in Greek ante 350 A.D. and is preserved in the Vatican Museum, Rome.
54.Chopin's famous Waltz No. 3 in F Major is said to have been inspired by a cat walking over piano keys.
55.Victor Hugo's Les Miserables, there is a sentence that contains 823 words, containing 93 commas, 51 semicolons and 4 dashes.
56.Benjamin Disraeli, one of England's most influential prime ministers, wrote his first novel Vivian Grey in 1826 in order to pay off large debts he incurred in the stock market.
57.In China, the first printed book, a copy of the Buddhist Diamond Sutra is produced using carved wooden blocks to print the text on paper.
58.The first book on deaf education, by Juan Pablo Bonet, is published in 1620, inaugurating the field of special education.
59.Alfred Lord Tennyson wrote "Crossing The Bar" while crossing to Yarmouth, Isle of Wight, from Lymington, Dorset, jotting down the 16 lines (almost unchanged in the final version) on an old envelope.
60.The fastest time in which a book has been published is 46.5 hours from receipt of manuscript to finished copies, titled
Miracle on Ice, by the staff of the New York Times from Feburary 17 to February 29 of 1980. The book is 96 pages and published by Bantam Books.
61.Pablo Picasso's 78 year career had finished 13,500 paintings, 100,000 prints and engravings, 34,000 book illustrations, and 300 sculptures and ceramics.
62.Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's last 3 major symphonic works were the Symphony No. 39 in E flat major, the Symphony in G minor, and the 'Jupiter' Symphony in C, were written in 6 weeks flat in 1788.
63.A French literary paper "Le Constitutionel" managed in 1844-1845 had increased its readership from 3,000 to 40,000, an arise that seems to have been brought out by the serialisation of Eugene Sue's novel
Juif Errant.
64.The longest encyclopedia was written by China's Yu-Hai, published in 1738 at 240 volumes.
65.When Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was 13, he heard the secret song of the Sistine Choir and copied it out from memory.
66.The first American dictionary was Noah Webster's
A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language, at 408 pagesm published in 1806 at New Haven, Connecticut by Sidney's press for Hudson and Goodwin.
67.The first dictionary compiled by a woman was
The Language of Fashion, edited by Mary Brooks Picken, published February 2, 1940, in New York City, containing 8,000 term and 600 illustrations relating to wearing apparel.
68.The first novel written by a black was William Wells Brown's
Clotel, or the President's Daughter, a Narrative of Slave Life in the United States, published in London, England, in 1853, at 403 pages and sold for ten cents.