Fun facts on The DaVinci Code

With the publication of Dan Brown’s next book on the horizon, this little fact sheet has been circulating around the building here in NYC. (For more fun stuff, become Dan Brown’s fan on Facebook!)

Eighty million copies of The Da Vinci Code have been sold. The novel has been translated into more than 50 languages and has been read by an estimated 480 million people…or about 10% of the world’s adult literate population. So how much is eighty million?

• Eighty million copies of The Da Vinci Code are enough to give a copy to every man, woman and child in Washington DC, London, Paris, Rome, Berlin, Moscow, Beijing, Tokyo, Sydney, Capetown and Rio de Janeiro.
• A stack of eighty million copies of The Da Vinci Code would reach into space…8 times higher than the International Space Station.
• Transporting eighty million copies of The Da Vinci Code would require a train pulling more than 800 box cars.
• Eighty million copies of The Da Vinci Code laid end to end would stretch from the North Pole to the South Pole.
• The weight of 80 million copies of The Da Vinci Code is more than 120 Boeing jumbo jets.
• The pages of 80 million copies of The Da Vinci Code laid end to end would stretch to the moon…and back…five times.
• If a person read one copy of The Da Vinci Code every day, it would take over 2000 centuries to read 80 million copies.

So that’s pretty cool, right? (That last one’s kinda “duh,” but still.)

Here are a few more, that I have compiled especially for you:

• 80 million copies of The Da Vinci Code would fill the bookshelves of nearly two-and-a-half Libraries of Congress. (Library of Congresses?)
• If cats were to read one copy of The Da Vinci Code in each of their nine lives, it would take 8,888,888 cats to read 80 million copies. That’s more than the estimated cat population in the USA!
• If a patron were to check out 80,000,000 copies of The Da Vinci Code from the Los Angles Public Library and return them 2 days late, the offender would face a $56,000,000 fine.
• If 50,000,000 copies of The Da Vinci Code departed from Chicago at 4:39am going 70mph and 30,000,000 copies of The Da Vinci Code departed from LA at 6:00am going 55mph, it would still be too early for me to do that kind of math.

-David