Last week I wrote about how I was going to blog about the history of bookstores, but I had lost my notes and had probably thrown them away because I could picture the piece of paper they were written on. Well, I don’t know what I was picturing because I found them….on the Notes app on my phone. I assume those are what I was looking for….but they really were not detailed enough to write a post anyway, so I will write a short bit at the end of this post.

 

A friend sent me these “facts” about English and other things. I have written about word trivia in previous posts and spoke about it in some of my talks. Sometimes, a couple of these tidbits will turn out not to be true. So believe at your own risk…

 

tremendous, horrendous, stupendous, and hazardous.

There are two words in the English language that have all five vowels in order: abstemious and facetious.

Typewriter is the longest word that can be made using the letters only on one row of the keyboard.

A cat has 32 muscles in each ear.
 
A goldfish has a memory span of three seconds.

A jiffy is an actual unit of time:  1/100th of a second.
 
A shark is the only fish that can blink with both eyes.
 
A snail can sleep for three years.

Almonds are a member of the peach family.
 
An ostrich’s eye is bigger than its brain.

Babies are born without kneecaps. They don’t appear until the child reaches 2 to 6 years of age.
 
February 1865 is the only month in recorded history to not  have a full moon.
 
In the last 4,000 years, no new animals have been domesticated.
 
If the population of China walked past you, eight abreast, the line would never end because of the rate of reproduction.
 
Leonardo Da Vinci invented the scissors.
 
Peanuts  are one of the ingredients of dynamite!
 
Rubber bands last longer when refrigerated.

The average person’s left hand does 56 percent of the typing. 

The cruise liner, QE 2 moves only six inches for each gallon of diesel that it burns.

The microwave was invented after a researcher walked by a radar tube and a chocolate bar melted in his pocket.

The winter of 1932 was so cold that Niagara Falls froze completely solid.

There are more chickens than people in the world.

Winston Churchill was born in a ladies room during a dance.

Women blink nearly twice as much as men. 

All the ants in Africa weigh more than ALL the Elephants!!

Some trivia about bookstores:

Ben Franklin owned the first bookstore in the United States, which was combined with his printing press.

I was surprised to hear that some of the first bookstores were very large book departments in major department stores like Neiman Marcus. They did very well, but eventually disappeare

New York and other large cities had book stalls out on the street lined up, some run by people who loved books and others run by drug addicts and the homeless.

Eventually, independent bookstores came into being, some specializing. There were black bookstores, Nazi bookstores, and white supremacist bookstore

Then the big box stores like Barnes and Noble and Borders came along. And then came Amazon and blew everything else away! Borders is gone, but Barnes and Noble remains.

And there are still some independents flourishing. I lived near two small chain independents when I lived in northern California. One, Copperfields, was where I launched all my grammar books. They were absolutely wonderful to me and other indie authors. They are still around as is Book Passage, which has two or three stores and is a little more snobbish. But then I have never tried to get my books in there since my first book was brand new. It is a wonderful store that also has a YouTube channel where you can see and hear some authors. I saw many wonderful authors (including Jimmy Carter) at those two indie bookstores.