I considered making this post about computer trivia, but decided to start instead with printing. After all, I am in the business of publishing novels and the printed word arrived long before Kindle. I found many of the facts listed below on a website called Printing Impressions. https://www.piworld.com/article/unusual-historical-facts-printing-industry/

1. Although Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press, he did not invent printing itself. That distinction goes to Chinese monks, who used pieces of wood dipped in ink to print scrolls, five hundred years before Mr. Gutenberg.
2.  They also invented business cards, not for commercial purposes, but to announce their visit to another person.
3. When printing first appeared, it was such an innovation that many thought it was witchcraft. To add to their distrust and fear over mechanically printed works, a widely accepted rumor was that red ink on a page was actually blood!
4. The Black Death significantly contributed to the evolution of the printing process. The dead left a surplus of clothes, which were inherited by the living, who could now dispose of their old, worn garments. The discarded clothes were used to make “rag paper,” which became an inexpensive alternative to parchment (sheepskin) and vellum (calfskin)—the only materials used in bookmaking at the time. Rag paper was a real bargain compared to the hundreds of calfskins and sheepskins it took to make one copy of the Bible—which was the staple text being produced.
5. After many of the monks, who spent inordinate amounts of time in laborious hand lettering of religious texts, especially the Bible, had succumbed to the Black Death, there was a massive void of bookmakers. The scarcity of these men drastically increased the cost of copying Bibles. At the same time, the cost of rag paper was continually decreasing. Ultimately, the mass production of cheap paper, combined with an absence of bookmakers, became incentives to create a better printing process.
6. Gutenberg died a poor man. He was sued by his wealthy business partners in 1455 and lost the lawsuit, which resulted in the iconic printer being forced to give up his printing business. He ultimately died a  poor man in 1468.
7. 150 copies of the Gutenberg bible, the first book created using moveable type, were originally printed but the whereabouts of only 49 are known today.
8. The first printing press arrived in Australia in 1788, but no one knew how to use it. George Hughes, a prisoner, was taught to use the machine and the governor, John Hunter, had him do all of the printing.
9. Ben Franklin and the Wright brothers were printers by trade.
10. The world’s smallest printed book (according to the “Guinness World Book of Records”) is a 22-page Japanese picture book, containing mostly flowers, that measures 0.0291×0.0295˝. A magnifying glass is necessary to see the images.
11. On the other side of the scale, the largest catalog printed was more than 2.5˝ thick. In January 2005, Aviall Services released its “Product and Catalog Book,” which contains 2,656 pages and weighs 7.4 lbs. Think of the Sears Wish Book on steroids.
12. The Incredible Hulk’s green skin color came about because of a mistake in the printing process. In the debut of Stan Lee’s comic book series “The Incredible Hulk,” Lee gave the Hulk a gray skin color to purposely disassociate the monster with any particular ethnic group. However, there were problems getting a consistent gray coloring, which resulted in a different-hued Hulk in each copy. Some of copies were green and, when Lee saw them, he decided that color suited the Hulk better anyway.
13. Long-time writer/artist for Marvel Comics, Mark Gruenwald’s last wish was to be cremated and have his ashes mixed with the ink in the printing of a comic book. The Marvel staff honored his request in August 1996, when Gruenwald (who worked on titles like “The Avengers,” “Captain America” and “Thor”) passed away from a heart attack at age 42. Some of the artist’s ashes were stirred into the ink of an issue of “Squadron Supreme,” one of the titles that he helped produce before his death.
14. Portable printing presses were used in the Civil War. The presses were small, which allowed soldiers to set them up on the battlefield. I sure wouldn’t want to be the poor fellow who had to run the thing!
15.  Mexico had a working printing press more than 100 years before America. That country began printing operations in 1534, while the first press in America up and running until 1639, when the Glover family arrived from England and opened a print shop in Cambridge, MA.
16. The initial print run of J.K. Rowling’s “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” broke a printing industry record. As a pop-culture phenomenon, all of the books in the “Harry Potter” series had initial print runs in the millions. But, “Deathly Hallows” greatly outnumbered the others, with 12 million copies in its first run, making it the largest initial print run ever recorded.

I have loved reading ever since Grade One, when I was introduced to the Dick & Jane series. Since then, I’ve been a voracious reader, always looking for the next masterpiece to bury myself in. I will be forever thankful for the advent of digital publishing, which allows me to purchase novels for a fraction of the cost of their printed copy. Although I don’t read as much since I started writing, mainly due to time constraints, at last count I had somewhere north of five hundred books, of various genre’s on my Kindle app. I have read every one of them, some of them multiple times. The cost alone is enough to entice me to indulge this addiction.