Since this story is about the value of brevity, I should tell you I set a length constraint. You can read it in 1:53, including what you just read.
The longest known traditional book is In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust. Published in 1913, it packs a whopping 1.2 million words. Of course, translations matter. More wordy languages bring the total up to 1.5 million. What’s a few hundred thousand words among fellow bookworms?
If you account for new publishing models enabled by the same internet that brought us wondrous advances like TikTok and Prancercize, the longest non-traditional book is Subspace Emissary’s Worlds Conquest by AuraChannelerChris. At somewhere north of four million words, you can fit roughly three and a half Prousts in there. And it’s not finished. As an online odyssey, it just grows and expands infinitely, like Hollywood’s collective ego.
I Do Not Like Long Books Here or There
As for the shortest, there are any number of empty satire books filled with blank pages, like The Wit and Wisdom of Spiro T. Agnew. But if we’re talking real books with some semblance of a plot, you might consider The Dinosaur by Augusto Monterroso. It’s so short we can reproduce the entire text here:
“When he awoke, the dinosaur was still there.”
I Do So Like Short Books Sam I Am
While the longest book is a deep, dreamy introspection on memory, life and the world around us, the shortest book, measured by unique words used, is about ham and eggs.
Yep. You guessed it.
That prize goes to Green Eggs and Ham by perennial favorite, Dr. Seuss. When angry, his mom called him Theodor Seuss Geisel.
Could You Write It In a Box?
By 1960, the year Bennett Cerf, Dr. Seuss’s publisher at Random House, challenged him to write an epic children’s book using just 50 words, Dr. Seuss was well on his way to the literary hall of fame. Starting way back, in 1937, he unleashed timeless classics like The Cat in the Hat, Horton Hears a Who! and How the Grinch Stole Christmas! along with 15 other classics. More came later.
50 to 8 Million Sam I Am
Seuss accepted the boxed-in challenge, writing “Green Eggs and Ham” using just 50 unique words, with some strategic repetition, of course.
The results? A smash hit, selling over 8 million copies.
It just goes to show, the best way to add is to subtract.
By the way, if ChatGPT can count using all fingers and toes, this article contains 257 unique words. I didn’t even try to economize, Sam I Am.
