Celebrate National Library Week by hitting the books
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We're in the middle of National Library Week, a seven-day celebration of those book-filled wonders. How better to celebrate the week than with a little knowledge?
George Washington has a huge late fine at the New York Society Library
The country's first president left quite a legacy, including a $300,000 fine for overdue library books.
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He checked out two volumes from the New York Society Library in 1789: "an essay on international affairs called Law of Nations and the twelfth volume of a 14-volume collection of debates from the English House of Commons." But the president never returned them.
Washington has been accruing a fine ever since, at several cents per day, adjusted for inflation.
Libraries come in many different forms — including camels
Bookmobiles, those beloved mobile libraries, usually take the form of trucks and vans in the U.S., but in other countries, librarians get creative.
In "My Librarian is a Camel," Margriet Ruurs catalogs the different ways books reach rural areas around the globe.
Books travel by boat, by bike and on the back of elephants. In Kenya and Mongolia, camels carry the books, while in rural Colombia there's the Biblioburro — a trusty donkey that shoulders the load.
These famous folks were once librarians
Political heavyweights J. Edgar Hoover, Golda Meir and Mao Zedong all worked in libraries around the world.
On the literary front, Lewis Carroll, Madeleine L'Engle, Marcel Proust and Beverly Cleary also served in the stacks.
And there's Giacomo Casanova — as in the Casanova, infamous for his scandalous love affairs — who had a love affair with reading as a librarian in Venice.
The first library dates back almost 5,000 years
The earliest known library was built in Sumeria, somewhere around 2600 BC. Think cuneiform and clay tablets instead of library cards.
Remnants from these libraries have been discovered on archaeological digs, but the material isn't exactly riveting in a modern sense: It's mostly records of commercial transactions. It's hard to have a page-turner, after all, if there aren't any actual pages.
The largest library in the world is in London ... or Washington, D.C.
The United Kingdom's national library boasts the largest collection in the world, with more than 170 million cataloged items. Fourteen million of those are books, but the library also holds a mind-boggling amount of magazines, maps, music recordings and more.
As of 2011, the British Library was adding approximately three million items every year — that's about six miles of shelf space.
That said, many still crown the Library of Congress as the world's largest. If you go by miles of shelf space and sheer number of books, the Washington, D.C., repository does win. (That's 838 miles and more than 37 million books.) The Library of Congress' vast collection includes materials in more than 470 languages.