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Everyone’s favorite billionaire Bill Gates bought ‘Codex Leicester’, one of Leonardo Di Vinci’s scientific journals for $30.8 million.

2. Longest book in the world:

‘A la recherche du temps perdu’ by Marcel Proust is the longest book in the world at 9,609,000 characters. Translated into Remembers of Things Past, the book tells the story of the narrator’s experiences growing up.

3. Roald Dahl’s interesting life experiences:

Dahl served in the Royal Air Force during World War II and also tested chocolates for Cadbury’s while he was at school. (I guess we know where his inspiration for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory came from).

5. Victor Hugo’s 823 word long sentence:

In Victor Hugo’s novel, Les Miserables, you can find a sentence that is 823 words long. However, there may be other sentences that surpasses this length. But this one is worth knowing.

6. J.K. Rowling is not actually her name:

Our favorite author who goes by initials, actually doesn’t have a middle name. After a suggestion from her publisher, she chose her grandmother’s name, Kathleen.

7. Charles Dickens’ superstitious behaviour:

Dickens believed that sleeping facing North, would improve his writing. He also carried a compass when travelling to make sure he was facing the right direction and he always touched things 3 times for luck.

8. Tolstoy owes War and Peace to his wife’s efforts:

The 1400 page novel was copied around 7 times by Leo Tolstoy’s wife, Sophia, by hand – that’s love.

9. The words F. Scott Fitzgerald created that you use everyday:

Oxford English Dictionary notes the earliest use of the word ‘wicked’ to mean good/cool to be from Fitzgerald’s novel ‘This Side of Paradise’. He is also thought to have used the word T-shirt for the first time.

10. The children’s story that China banned:

The Governor of Hunan Province in China banned Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland because he believed that animals should not be given the power to use the language of humans and to put animals and humans on the same level would be ‘disastrous’.

To celebrate, he decided he wanted to give his new pet, Rothko, and millions of other rescue dogs a voice by creating a new photo series entitled Poetic Dogs.

Bannino wrote on the project’s IndieGoGo page: “#POETICDOGS is a photo-project where dogs are besides famous writers: Speaking through their expressions, sounds and movements, they’re telling you everything saying nothing, just like an author would do with words in a fine poem.”

All the dogs featured in the series are from the same kennel near Turin, in Italy, where Bannino’s dog, Rothko, was adopted from.

Charles Dickens

Charles Pierre Baudelaire

Edgar Allan Poe

Emily Dickinson

Ernest Hemingway

James Joyce

Leo Tolstoy

Mark Twain

Oscar Wilde

William Shakespeare

You can see more of the pictures and learn about the dogs’ stories on Bannino’s Facebook and Instagram pages.

The Double (film tie-in)

Author: Fyodor Dostoyevsky

ISBN:9780141396187

The Double is a novel written by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. The Double centers on a government clerk who goes mad. It deals with the internal psychological struggle of its main character, Yakov Petrovich Golyadkin, who repeatedly encounters someone who is his exact double in appearance but confident, aggressive, and extroverted, characteristics that are the polar opposites to those of the toadying “pushover” protagonist.

The motif of the novel is a doppelganger (Russian “dvoynik”), known throughout the world in various guises such as the fetch.

Price: 24,5 GEL

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The Gift

Author: Vladimir Nabokov

ISBN:9780141196985

The Gift is the last of the novels Nabokov wrote in his native Russian and the crowning achievement of that period in his literary career.  It is also his ode to Russian literature, evoking the works of Pushkin, Gogol, and others in the course of its narrative:  the story of Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev, an impoverished émigré poet living in Berlin, who dreams of the book he will someday write—a book very much like The Gift itself.

Price: 35 GEL

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Anna Karenina

Author: Leo Tolstoy

ISBN:9780140624496

Married to a powerful government minister, Anna Karenina is a beautiful woman who falls deeply in love with a wealthy army officer, the elegant Count Vronsky. Desperate to find truth and meaning in her life, she rashly defies the conventions of Russian society and leaves her husband and son to live with her lover. Condemned and ostracized by her peers and prone to fits of jealousy that alienate Vronsky, Anna finds herself unable to escape an increasingly hopeless situation.

Set against this tragic affair is the story of Konstantin Levin, a melancholy landowner whom Tolstoy based largely on himself. While Anna looks for happiness through love, Levin embarks on his own search for spiritual fulfillment through marriage, family, and hard work. Surrounding these two central plot threads are dozens of characters whom Tolstoy seamlessly weaves together, creating a breathtaking tapestry of nineteenth-century Russian society.

From its famous opening sentence—”Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”—to its stunningly tragic conclusion, this enduring tale of marriage and adultery plumbs the very depths of the human soul.

Price: 15,9 GEL

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