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alt title(s): Tree Killer 
“I like a thick book because it will steady a table, a leather volume to strop a razor and a heavy book to throw at the cat.”
A common literary term that refers to a book so thick and heavy that it can be used as a doorstopper. Or a weapon. While it is likely to be used in a spirit of derision, as it evokes the idea of Padding in spades, there are also many fine books that could technically stop a door or kill a man in a pinch.
Proper Door Stoppers (also known as Tree Killers) should be over 500 pages. If one book is over 1000 pages, it is probably a Door Stopper: either the material is padded, or the book could profitably be divided into smaller books. This goes double if the typeface is smaller than 10 point.
When talking about a "doorstopper series", the series in question is likely to involve great battles between good and evil, a Chosen One and mysterious jewelry. Airport Fantasy, in short. It is a doorstopper series if, and only if, every actual book in the series is a Door Stopper.
Oftentimes, publishers will turn an ordinary trilogy, tetralogy, or series into one huge book. This is not strictly a Door Stopper but an " Omnibus". These books, though, can invariably be used to stop doors, press flowers, act as fake gold in a bank robbery, or crush small children. These are sometimes for the convenience of fans of the series. Other times, with very long series or ones where the order almost doesn't matter, it's to sell volumes that don't sell anywhere near as well as the most popular books in the series.
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Examples:
Comic Books
- Katsuhiro Otomo's cyber punk/BioPunk magnum opus of manga, Akira, weighs in with six small-phonebook-sized volumes totaling 2182 pages.
- Jeff Smith's Bone. Other Comicbooks can — and have — run longer, but few of them are published as a single-volume, 1,300 page tome.
- The Cerebus "phone book" collections; all but the thinnest two or three he has, indeed, seen stop doors. And they're trade paperbacks!
- Publishers have recently released complete collections of the entire runs of certain newspaper comic strips, including Calvin And Hobbes as well as The Far Side. Though spread out into multiple volumes, each one is still pretty hefty.
- The complete Calvin and Hobbes weighs over 50 pounds.
- The Far Side one
 is in two volumes, each being about as big as a double-size cereal box and the preface even calls it an "18-pound hernia giver".
Literature
- The ultimate example is Henry Darger's In the Realms of the Unreal, includes The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion, continuing for 15,145 pages, about nine million words. This would make it longer than À la recherche du temps perdu, Clarissa, A Suitable Boy, Atlas Shrugged, War and Peace, all the Harry Potter novels, Les Misérables, Mission Earth, A Dance to the Music of Time, Le Vicomte de Bragelonne, ou Dix ans plus tard, Dream of the Red Chamber and Artamene put together. The average reader can get through 200 words a minute; if you read for two hours a day, In the Realms of the Unreal would take about a year to get through. Darger also wrote a 25,000 page book about his life with over a thousand accompanying drawings, simply called ''The History of My Life.''◊.
- More or less anything by Neal Stephenson after he gained any success.
- Anathem (see the picture) is a thousand pages long, complete with a glossary, 3 appendices, and, in the promo copy sent to reviewers and book stores, honest to god Feelies.
- Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson. The fact that it's printed in a small typeface is a telling indication that you should be grateful that it's only 918 pages long. Some printings break the four-digit mark, coming in at 1054 pages. Latin America, thankfully, saw it released as three separate tomes.
- Similarly, any volumes of his Baroque Cycle, which each top 900 pages (admittedly because Stephenson really wanted either one enormous book or 8 novels, and instead we get a trilogy with each book containing 2-3 of the 'novels'). And if you want to see a real Door Stopper, Stephenson's handwritten manuscript is probably taller than him.
- Robert Jordan's Wheel Of Time series. Lengthy discussions on clothes, increasingly petty arguments between characters and such appear more and more frequently towards the end of the series. There's a joke that the entire series could have been a mere three books, but Jordan was getting paid by the word. So, being a connoisseur of eating regularly, he padded it out with descriptions of clothing, slap-fights and whatnot. The joke concludes by pointing out that if you only read every third paragraph you wouldn't miss a thing.
- George RR Martin's A Song Of Ice And Fire. A Storm of Swords is so vast it was split into two volumes (subtitled Steel and Snow and Blood and Gold) in the UK, each of which is a Door Stopper in its own right.
- Dune by Frank Herbert (though the second instalment, Dune Messiah, is an exception). There's an omnibus edition of the first three novels, called "The Great Dune Trilogy". With appendices etc., it clocks in at a reasonable 912 pages.
- Harry Potter - if you stack all seven books one on top of another, they form a pile over 30cm tall - kids' books! The amazing thing is that kids still read them regardless, sometimes in one night. Lampshaded in Return of the Bunny Suicides, where a bunny orders Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix so that it can wait under the mail slot and be killed when the book drops on its head.
- One of the reasons The Lord Of The Rings was and is published as a trilogy is that it's too bulky as a single volume, as well as post-war paper shortages. Fortunately it was already conveniently divided into six sections, so there was no problem publishing it in three volumes of two sections apiece. I believe the first single-volume edition appeared in the 70s, and even then they initially left out most of the Appendices. It's worth noting that one of Tolkien's goals was to invent an "English mythology" around a central text. Historic works like the Homeric epics that do this for established mythologies are themselves usually Doorstoppers, particularly if heavily annotated.
- Basically anything written by the author Tad Williams end up like this.
- To Green Angel Tower was so big, it had to be split into two parts when printed as a mass-market paperback.
- The Memory, Sorrow and Thorn trilogy was released as twelve volumes in Finland.
- The Otherland series of which there are four volumes.
- Not quite true - his Tailechaser's Song and Caliban's Hour are very short, while The War of the Flowers is reasonably sized (compared to To Green Angel Tower, anyway).
- Leo Tolstoy's War And Peace, famously so. In fact, the adjective "tolstoy" *
Which, as it happens, is related to the Russian word tolstyj, meaning 'big' or 'fat' has become the Russian language's official word for a Doorstopper-y book. Late 19th century Russian authors like Tolstoy and Dostoevsky were paid by the page, hence the length of their works. It's also worth noting that many of these books were published in serial installments, so the authors were not thinking in terms of one collected volume when the stories were written.
- Konstantin Simonov's The Living and The Dead and Mikhail Sholokhov's Quiet Don are even more doorstopperrific.
- The Gulag Archipelago (also by Alexander Solzhenitsyn), on the other hand, clocks in at 1,930 pages split across three volumes, the latter two of which appear to be out of print, while the first volume and an abridged one-volume edition remain in print. (Has this happened for any other books?)
- Terry Goodkind's Sword Of Truth series. Eleven of the buggers, though the last three are a lot shorter than the others. The second one takes the cake; it can clock in at just shy of 1000 pages, and some editions go well over
- The later books of Stephen King's epic The Dark Tower. A lot of King's other books could fit this as well (especially the uncut version of The Stand).
- Here in Holland, a woman pressed charges against a mail company because a copy of King's IT KILLED HER CHIHUAHUA when it dropped through the mail chute. Go figure.
- The Canterbury Tales. Notably, it's still a Doorstopper even though Chaucer was a long way from completing it when he died.
- A Suitable Boy
- Atlas Shrugged, which depending on your edition can easily clock in at over 1200 pages (the climax alone is an uninterrupted speech that runs for over fifty pages). Atlas must have shrugged because he was tired of carrying the Writer On Board.
- Battlefield Earth.
- Mission Earth, a ten volume novel by L. Ron Hubbard, who also wrote Battlefield Earth.
- More specifically, the hardcover pressing of the book's volumes add up to 3992 pages. Folks, that's longer than all of Lord of the Rings (1178 pages) and Akira (2182 pages) combined, with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows (607 pages in the original U.K. pressing) thrown in for good measure.
- Pandora's Star and Judas Unchained by Peter F. Hamilton, each clocking in at around 1200 pages (in paperback). One wonders why he didn't just make it a trilogy.
- The Dreaming Void will be a trilogy. Yes, 2 books of 1200+ pages each, and he's still not done. Really, though, the first two are more like one book. Trust the voice of experience.
- Hamilton seems incapable of finishing his books properly (good books tho'). His only "ends" are the ends of series. Only 'The Evolutionary Void' seems to avoid this.
- Not to mention The Nights Dawn Trilogy which in the states had to be broken up into 6 volumes (though still billed as a trilogy). Three books of 1200+ pages each; buy the complete trilogy and you'll need a truck to get it home.
- All three books in Christopher Paolini's Inheritance series, with Eldest reaching a good 700 pages! For this, and other reasons, the Inheritance anti-fandom has nicknamed the books 'the bricks'. (Although, after careful testing, it transpires that the books cannot literally stop a door.)
- Four of the six books of James Clavell's "Asian Saga" are over 1000 pages long, including Shogun. The other two (as it happens, the first two to be written) are over 500.
- Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. 1,079 pages, including 96 pages of footnotes.
- Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon mixes Door Stopper (760 pages) with Mind Screw for a tome you will not be able to finish. (Which is why it didn't win the Pulitzer Prize — half the committee wanted it to win, the other half couldn't finish it.)
- Pynchon's later novels Mason & Dixon and Against the Day are 784 and 1104 pages, respectively.
- His first, V., is a bit more concise at 533 pages.
- Les Miserables by Victor Hugo.
- Anything by James A. Michener, notably Centennial. Twelve hundred pages. I was made to read it in high school, but I don't regret it. It's a good read.
- Mr. Michener's writing is entertaining, but it's true that his later books should be under the by-line "James Michener and his Research Team".
- Anything Tom Clancy has ever written.
- Ben from My Family is seen reading The Bear and The Dragon at bedtime for two entire seasons, though of course it doesn't help that he's always being badgered by his Control Freak wife Susan. It's eventually lampshaded when he chooses it as his book when Susan decides to start a book club, much to her disapproval. Whether this was a comment on the enormous size of the book, the fact he never gets a chance to read it or both is unknown.
- Clancy's Debt of Honor and Executive Orders are one story, split over two volumes, not unlike LOTR.
- It seems that that after The Hunt For Red October, which is actually pretty good, especially for a first novel, Tom Clancy's editor just ''up and died'', and publishers now just print his first drafts. Especially noticable in The Bear and The Dragon, when he repeats five different phrases ten times each, within five hundred pages. The book itself is thirteen hundred pages long. Eventually, the repetition just makes you want to eat your own head.
- Steven Erikson's Malazan Book Of The Fallen series: The smallest of the books so far clocking in at around 600 pages. Depending on the the format it gets up to 1,400 pages. And the finished series will have ten books. However, the incredibly comprehensive and high-quality World Building makes it worth it.
- At 1.5 million words, Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time, earlier translated as Remembrance of Things Past, holds the Guinness Book of Records title as Longest Novel. Getting back to Proust: Monty Python's Flying Circus did a sketch on summarizing the whole thing in 15 seconds.
- Robert Shea's and Robert Anton Wilson's Illuminatus! Trilogy.
- That being said, Illuminatus! was originally published as three separate books. Your average airport-thriller/airport-fantasy novel is the same size as the whole trilogy combined.
- My copy of the trilogy clocks in at just over 800 pages. It's big for one book, but not for three plus appendices.
- The Shelters of Stone could be at least 200 pages shorter by the judicious use of the sentence, "And Ayla introduced herself again." Every time she meets someone she has to tell her whole backstory. Another few hundred, if you'd leave out the sex scenes. But then, the books wouldn't have become the best sellers they were. Heck, you could chop a good fifty pages off of the series just by omitting all descriptions of genitals.
- The Sword of Shannara was a painfully long
ripoff homage of The Lord Of The Rings. The later books in the series were thankfully shorter and more original. This is because Sword of Shannara is basically the entire Lord Of The Rings trilogy as one book with a sword instead of a ring as the Plot Device.
- Ditto for the Iron Tower Trilogy, which is an even more blatant
ripoff homage of Lord of the Rings than the above, when packaged as one book.
- Imajica, by Clive Barker, also had to be split into two volumes when released as a paperback.
- Eiji Yoshikawa's Musashi, a fictionalized version of the life of Musashi Miyamoto, is over 900 pages, typically printed on unusually thin paper. It was originally a multi-year newspaper serial.
- Similarly, several of Charles Dickens' novels are massive due to their origin as newspaper serials.
- Dave Barry once gave a joke etymology about “hurting like the dickens” being representative of the pain of having the entirety of the writings of Charles Dickens (consisting of voluminous volumes, considering how prolific the guy was) dropped on someone from a window.
- The Black Library, the publisher for Warhammer 40000 fiction, tends to produce "omnibuses", which are collections of novels gathered into large, and, fittingly for the franchise, lethally heavy volumes. These include the Space Wolves Omnibus, the Soul Drinkers Omnibus, Sandy Mitchell's Ciaphas Cain omnibus For The Emperor, two Gaunts Ghosts omnibuses (by Dan Abnett) titled The Founding and The Saint, and a whole lot more.
- The Dragonlance Trilogy has been combined into a single doorstopper. The Annotated Dragonlance is even worse because of all the, y'know, annotations and stuff.
- Not exactly one book, but one of the Collected Works of Sherlock Holmes clocks in at 1300 and change.
- The Collected Works of Shakespeare clocks in at 1448 pages. Very thin pages, everything double-columned.
- The unpublished Stephen Colbert's Alpha Squad 7: Lady Nocturne: A Tek Jansen Adventure is an extremely hefty paperback, probably in reference to The Lord Of The Rings (as the actor is very much One Of Us). Thankfully, the book exists only within the warped reality of The Colbert Report.
- Grady Tripp's long-delayed novel (3000+ pages and nowhere near finished) in Wonder Boys.
- The original novel of The Princess Bride is stated in character to be William Goldman's "good bits" abridgment of a 1000 page novel.
- The novel . . .And the Ladies of the Club is over 1,000 pages long, supposedly took the author over 50 years to write, and is about, well, the founding members of a ladies book club in Ohio from post-Civil War to the 1930's. It's much more readable than it sound.
- Philip K. Dick's unfinished Exegesis was said to be around 8,000 pages long before he died. Eight thousand.
- While only published via computer to date (and unlike to be picked up for printing any time soon), the serial novel The Saga Of Tuck would surely fit this description if bound in a single volume.
- The Count Of Monte Cristo. The longest adaptation is 8 hours, and they still had to cut out a lot of the details. And then you have the anime version, which is 26 half-hour episodes long. Accounting for commercial breaks, that's almost 11 hours. The original, unabridged novel, printed on flimsy paper and in small type, produces an over-sized paperback volume a good four inches thick. Alexandre Dumas was originally paid by the word for the original serial novel (published by chapter in the newspaper) and he made the most of it. Still one hell of a read.
- Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast novels are available in omnibus form, which is in the neighbourhood of 1000 pages of novel and 150-odd of critical essays.
- Sir Thomas Malory's ''Le Morte d'Arthur'' is over 900 pages, divided into 507 chapters, admittedly short ones by modern standards.
- The Honor Harrington books by David Weber. They start at 300 pages of character development, climax, cleanup (and lots of death), and spiral into 900+ page space soap operas filled with dating troubles, feudal succession, poker games and political intrigue.
- And that's abridged versions! War of Honor, ticking at 800+ pages as it is, had the whole subplot about Esther McQueen's rebellion cut out from the draft. It was later published as a separate novella.
- The Twilight series, especially the later books. Breaking Dawn takes the cake at 752 pages. The plot starts at around page 650. That's an awful lot of padding.
- See also Stephenie Meyer's The Host for adults.
- Sir Richard Francis Burton's translation of 1,001 Arabian Nights — sixteen massive volumes. The Project Gutenberg .txt files together weigh in at nearly 14mb. .txt!
- Don Quixote (The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote of La Mancha), by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra.
- Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell.
- The Handbook of Robotics, as described in Isaac Asimov's Elijah Bailey novels, has undergone so many revisions, additions, and emendations in the several millenia it's been in print, that a hard-copy of it would be impossible for an ordinary person to carry unassisted. Fortunately, in the 47th century, most books are printed on microfilm.
- James Ellroy's LA Confidential is just barely short of 500 pages, but is still pretty fast paced with its Loads and Loads of Characters all ending up with some important role in the story. His next book, White Jazz, was originally around 700 pages. When the publisher asked Ellroy to trim it down, he responded by removing every single word that could even remotely be considered extraneous, resulting in a 350-something page book which is insanely dense and has to be read incredibly carefully. There's even a few conversations where it takes quite a while to get any hints outside of the dialogue itself about who's talking.
- The complete works of almost any author who was at least moderately prolific.
- James Joyce's "Ulysses" - nearly 1000 pages with notes, and believe me you need them.
- Margaret Weisman and Tracy Hickman wrote a series of books called The Death Gate Cycle, with 7 books. Particularly the 5th, which takes place in the universe's near version of hell, is a brick.
- Miyuki Miyabe's Brave Story is, at least in it's English translation, 816 pages. Sadly, it takes until page 222 to really get into the story proper.
- In the first episode of Man to Man with Dean Learner, they unveil Garth Marenghi's The Oeuvre, containing all 436 horror novels he's written in a reinforced spine made from genuine cat bone. It looks less like one giant book and more like a tower of books fused together.
- Any one book of Colleen Mc Cullough's Masters Of Rome series is quite an intimidating sight, and the series is now seven books and counting. They're not quite as bad as they look due to the sizeable introductions, afterwards, and glossaries, but each story is still 950-1050 pages.
- Any book by Edward Rutherfurd, an author who likes, in all his books, to start at day one and move up through the millennia of whatever area he is currently writing about. Historical fiction, very heavy on the details and that in turn makes very heavy doorstoppers. The paperback edition of his novel The Forest is 883 pages long and the paperback edition of London is a whopping 1299 pages!
- Any Norton Anthology of... well, of anything. The print is microscopic, and yet they could still be used as bludgeons. The Norton Anthology of English Literature (Volume 1) in paperback runs to 2518 pages of thin paper, not counting indexes and appendices.
- Most of Melanie Rawn's works. She just doesn't do less than 800 pages in paperback with 8 point type, which just might be why you've never heard of her. Both Dragon Prince and Dragon Star are triliogies of incredible length, with a frustrating number of similiarly-named characters. Not works for the faint of heart, or sound of mind.
- Jonathan Strange And Mr Norrell.
- Many classic Chinese novels are in the 2000-page range, though most editions are split into volumes:
- The works of Ken Follett.
- Pamela by Samuel Richardson. Actually, anything by Samuel Richardson.
- The Tale of Genji. Its length varies by language and translator, but one copy is a set of 2 doorstoppers in small print. The Other Wiki gives a good example of length: the cast list has over 400 characters.
- Vikram Chandra's very good crime thriller epic Sacred Games is the novel equivalent of a Bollywood movie. (Over 1080 pages.)
- The three books (so far) that collect the two Love and Rockets stories (Palomar, Locas, and Locas 2) clocking in at 1640 pages so far... zeah I read the first two....after walking to wrk... with them in a backpack...had strong legs.
- Most of Wayne Johnston's novels are doorstoppers - The Colony of Unrequited Dreams is over 600 pages... in trade paperback, and they look much longer than that in hardcover. And they are very heavy to lift.
- The Phase novels of the Whateley Universe. "Ayla and the Tests" is longer than six out of seven Harry Potter books.
- Sharon Penman's The Sunne in Splendour, which is at least a thousand pages long and de-villainises King Richard III, turning him into a sympathetic protagonist who adores his wife Anne Neville. It also gives readers an inside look at the shifting loyalties and political intrigue of the Wars of the Roses.
- It was later ripped off by Anne Easter Smith in A Rose for the Crown, which was shorter and focused on the supposed mother of Richard's three illegitimate children. It's generally agreed to be a Mary Sue, but that doesn't stop it from being long.
- The Great Book of Amber, by Roger Zelazny, is actually ten fairly small books making up the entirety of the Amber series. However, unless you're prepared to search, this is the only version actually available and has been the only one in print for years. Clocks in at somewhere around 1200 pages if I'm not mistaken.
- If you'd print out the web-published Alternate History Decades Of Darkness, you'd need more than 1800 sheets of paper (using an average-sized font and paper).
- The Chung Kuo series of science fiction novels by David Wingrove. First published as eight hefty volumes of six or seven hundred pages each, it is due to be re-released in 2010 as eighteen books of presumably more reasonable size. It is eighteen because the original series was supposed to be nine books, but Wingrove's publisher refused to publish the ninth, forcing him to combine the last two books. The new release will include the complete nine books at two volumes per book...
- The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser; over 1000 pages of verse poetry. And, like Chaucer, he didn't get close to finishing it before Author Existence Failure; he planned 24 'books', and finished only 6 of them.
- Timothy Zahn's Vision of the Future clocks in at 720 pages in one paperback version, though other versions and the hardcover aren't quite as pagy. Shorter than most of these, but that's the longest novel of the Star Wars Expanded Universe to date. The German version was split into two separate books. And you'd hardly notice while reading it.
- The ''Trouble's Tales'' series is probably the closest thing the Furry Fandom has to an original literary epic, with the individual chapters alone being at long has most novels, and with good reason! One of the advertising taglines for it accuratly states that the series has everything, and by "everything" we do mean everything. (Mostly every kind of sex ever concieved by mankind, and several concieved by wombats, but also a fair dose of action and sci-fi.) Luckily, every single story is availible to read for free online, and can only be bought in physical form via an online retailer who makes them one at a time — because, well, it's huge!
- The collected Chronicles Of Thomas Covenant by Stephen Donaldson could stop bullets.
- Possibly the ultimate single-volume Door Stopper: Someone has published Agatha Christie's The Complete Miss Marple in one volume of 4,032 pages massing 8kg!
- Samuel Delany's Dhalgren, which runs to about 800 pages.
- Initially published as three separate books, the most readily availible incarnation of Guy Gavriel Kay's The Fionavar Tapestry is a single-volume printing of 792 pages. He wrote a legitimate Door Stopper later on with Tigana (688 pages).
- An edition of The Faerie Queene runs to 787 pages, counting indexes and introductions.
Fanfic
- Thanks to the lack of editors, Fan Fiction has a tendency to run into this, if you count works that are never or hardly ever printed and thus are unsuitable for doorstop use. For instance, FanFiction.Net, as of April 6, 2009, lists 326 Harry Potter stories longer than the 255,000-word Order of the Phoenix, the longest in the series, many of these incomplete. 686 are longer than Goblet of Fire's 191,000 words. At least seventeen FF.Net stories have over a million words, with the Ah My Goddess fanfic Trial By Tenderness having recently broken the 2 million mark — at Harry Potter word-per-page rates, that's 6,800 pages, and over three times the length of Atlas Shrugged. The author doesn't seem to be planning on stopping anytime soon, either.
- Undocumented Features clocks in at (as of early November 2008) approximately 20 megabytes of pure ASCII text. That's 3.5 million words long. Which actually makes it longer than the Sacrifices Arc.
- Don't forget These Black Eyes in the Teen Titans section... over 2 million words, 214 chapters...
- Shinji And Warhammer 40 K is 521,000 words long. It shows, too; each chapter is a veritable mountain of text.
- Then there's Lightning on the Wave's Alternate Universe Harry Potter epic known as the Sacrifices Arc. It's posted as 7 separate stories (mirroring the 7-book format of the HP series), so the site doesn't record the full tale's word count. This is really too bad, since it clocks in at just over 3 million words. Surprisingly enough (for a fanfic), it's actually a complete story. The author wrote it between September '05 and Jan '07, posting an average of 6400 words per day.
- Now hiring!
- The Firefly fanfic Forward is upwards of 275,000 words in length. Tiberium Wars, by the same author, looks like its going to run a risk of hitting this as well, as it is only seventeen chapters long at this point but is clocking in at over 150,000 words, and canonically, it hasn't even finished the first of the actual game's five acts.
- Video game novelizations almost inevitably fall under this trope, by the nature of the format.
Magazines
- At the height of its popularity, Electronic Gaming Monthly would crank out issues that totaled about 400+ pages in length (although half the pages were just ads.) For comparison's sake, the magazine could barely fill 100 pages by the time it died in early 2009.
- Japanese Shonen Jump volumes are phone-book thick, weighing in at about 500 pages each. And this is a weekly series. Hope you're big into recycling.
Religion and Mythology
- The Bible tends to be printed on special thin paper to allow it to be read without divine intervention.
- Try the LDS "quad" (a single volume containing the Bible, Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants, and Pearl of Great Price - all these collectively known as the "Standard Works"). What with footnote helps, the Bible clocks in at 1590 pages, the Book of Mormon at 531, the D&C at 294, and the PGP at 61. Add in the Topical Guide, Bible Dictionary, Index, maps, Joseph Smith translation, title pages for each contained work, prefatory material, etc., and you're now up to 3820 pages total in one volume on thin paper.
- The Talmud uses quite a few meters of space in your library, especially in its now-standard "Babylonian" version. Well, it's essentialy a commentary on the whole of the bible, plus a commentary on said commentary... The Vilna edition of the Talmud weighs in at 5,894 folio pages.
- A lot of epics - by definition - are doorstoppers. (But not all of them.) The Mahabharata and the Ramayana for instance. The Ramayana is roughly 24,000 stanzas long. Or Spenser's Faerie Queene or Milton's Paradise Lost.
- The one that takes the cake - and is literally THE longest piece of literature in the world- has never been definitively compiled. This is because the work, The Epic of King Gesar, is some 20 million words long and would take an estimate of 120 volumes to complete.
- The Granth, the holy book of Sikhism, by tradition, is printed in lavishly decorated volumes that are about the size of a coffee table.
- The Pali canon, which forms the doctrinal core of Theravada Buddhism, runs anywhere between 40 and 60 volumes, depending on translation and how much commentary is included. As if that weren't enough, it was only first written down centuries after Buddhism began - before that, it was transmitted orally by chanting monks.
Close Religion and Mythology
Textbooks
- FORTRAN manuals, one assumes, should simply be left atop the VAX while the forklift moves it.
- In fact, pretty much any college textbook about computers is a Doorstopper. According to Amazon.com Deitel & Deitel's How to program in C/C++ and Java is 1,504 and 1,500 pages respectively.
- Not just computing, but natural sciences as well. One of the heaviest books in this editor's personal library is Gravitation by Misner, Thorne and Wheeler: it's the definitive textbook on general relativity, which means it's over 1200 pages and heavy enough to itself generate one of the black holes discussed in chapter 33.
- Molecular Biology of the Cell by Horton et al is a non-definitive textbook of biochemistry and cell physiology, which clocks in at well over 1400 pages — and that's without counting the lengthy table of contents and appendix. Gray's Anatomy (that's Gray's, not Grey's) is apparently even longer...
- Gray's Anatomy: 40th edition goes for 1576 pages
- Biology 2nd Edition by Knox, Ladiges, Evans and Saint, was referred to as "The Brick" at the university I attended.
- The Calculus: Early Transcendentals collection by James Stewart clocks in at a whopping one thousand, one hundred and sixty-eight pages, PLUS over two hundred pages of appendixes. Yeah. Damn thing almost broke my back lugging it to three years of calc classes.
- Theoretical Physics by Lev Landau, Evgeny Lifshitz et al is (despite its several flaws) the definite textbook outlining all areas of modern physics and unsurprisingly clocks itself at whopping TEN VOLUMES, 500+ pages each of pure undiluted humanities student's horror. The authors supposed that the readers know enough math to drop some rather nontrivial derivations as "obvious" *
There is an anecdote where Landau, having lost the 20-pages long draft of one particularily tricky derivation, didn't want to do it again, so he just offered to other co-authors to drop it at all as "obvious". They accepted. On the more serious note, the math level required from the reader of the more advanced chapters is extremely high. , or its page count could've easily topped 10000 (it's 5581 page in the most recent version). Though just as it is, even one volume would be enough to kill a man, and there were apocryphal reports of a student chasing off muggers with a bag of three volumes.
- Law school casebooks are wonderfully heavy. For example, Cohen, Varat and Amar's Constitutional Law, Cases & Materials, 12th Edition, weighs in at a hearty 1881 pages. And people think that the US Constitution is simple...
- You may have concluded by now that the best programming books are the thinnest ones.
- Don't forget about The Art of Computer Programming by Donald Knuth. You can actually stop two doors with it, because it comes in three volumes and naturally you can only read one at a time. And it's not done yet! Knauth plotted out seven volumes, of which Volume 4 had to be divided in three (and is only available in five very preliminary "fascicles"). It would be nothing short of a miracle if Knuth lived to finish it.
- Philosophy texts vary, but one thing you can be sure of is that if it's Kant, it's going to take some slogging. The Critique of Pure Reason sticks out in particular, mostly because several years after the first edition was published, Kant decided it needed to be rewritten and spent the next decade doing so. (Fortunately he died shortly thereafter or he might have redone it again.) Since there's enormous controversy over which version is better/clearer, some thoughtful publishers have put both the A and B versions in one volume, though some German philosophers claim it is much clearer to read the English translation. Fortunately, not all Kant's books were long. The Prolegomena, Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals and Critique of Practical Reason run under 200 pages each. Doesn't mean you can finish them on a plane ride, though (except the Groundwork, where you'd have a shot).
- Scott Mueller's Upgrading and Repairing PCs, currently in its 18th edition, and weighing in at about 1600 pages. Not quite a textbook, but a damn fine reference.
- Lest we forget the DVD including video and back editions. Someone, somewhere, is going to need a Baby AT system fixed. Not to mention looking up some details of the mindboggling prehistoric evil buried deep within even the newest chipsets...
- There are two ways to get Jansen's History of Art: as one large volume or two smaller ones. The singular one weighs twelve pounds.
- The Game Breaker is Flight Attendant Manuals. One airline had a manual that spanned SIX of those massive binders that are about four inches across the spine. The airline considered it one book, and did possess in the company library multiple copies that were bound like your more traditional book. This airline flew Fokker F-100s and F-50s - a small, 100-seat jet and Prop plane, respectively. Manuals for companies flying larger jets, and more than one model of jet? You don't even want to know.
- Harold McGee's On Food and Cooking is a seminal work on the entire science of comestibles, from garlic to creme brulee. Its goal is to teach people things they didn't know about food. It manages... and manages to be damned heavy at that.
- One Pathophysiology textbook. I don't have it handy right now, but I remember at least 1700 pages, not including the appendices.
- Reclaiming History by Vincent Bugliosi. This painstakingly comprehensive 1,600+ page book on all aspects of the JFK assassination contains a detailed account of the events of those four days, a biography of Lee Harvey Oswald, and 1,000 more pages analyzing every angle and debunking every possible conspiracy theory. There's even an included CD with 1,000 pages worth of endnotes.
- The single-volume abridged edition of Sir James George Frazier's anthropological work The Golden Bough is over 800 pages. The first edition was two volumes and the third edition was 12 volumes.
- The Culinary Institute of America's The Professional Chef, 8th edition clocks in at 1215 pages. And it's not the shape of a regular book, either. It's aprox. 9" by 11". It has been described friends as "Epic."
- This is hardly unusual for cookbooks of course — Escoffier's Le guide culinaire clocks in at 940 pages in the original French only because of Escoffier's highly concise and modular recipe-writing style, and most editions of The Joy of Cooking vaguely resemble bibles in their thin paper and dense layout. And Phaidon, an art publisher with a successful sideline in cookbooks, has a habit of publishing doorstop cookbooks as well — as an example, the book 1080 recetas de cocina in the original Spanish is almost pocket-sized, but the English edition, embellished with much photography and some awesome crayon art, is a thundering doorstop with three bookmark ribbons bound into the spine. (And let's not even get into Julia Child's monsterpiece The Way To Cook — not especially thick, no, but printed on very heavy paper and enough to break a table.)
- The History of the Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon is an intimidating 3000 pages. The Penguin Classics paperback edition is three doorstop size volumes.
- Windows Server 2008 Unleashed! is over 1600 pages long.
- "The New Penguin History of the World" is over 1200 pages long.
- The source code for most software would qualify as Doorstoppers. It's not uncommon for the source code to take up several Megabytes (a typical paperback novel 3cm thick takes up around 300-400KB). For something really complex, such as Linux, you're looking at several Gigabytes for the source code.
- It's not that bad. The Linux kernel, the engine which drives a Linux operating system, is only 58MB zipped up, and roughly 11 million lines of code. Extrapolation would put it, then, at somewhere around 200-220 thousand pages, and equivalent to a paperback 4.5-5.8 meters thick.
- A comprehensive manual for MS-DOS 5 was about two inches thick and printed in fine text. While not as impressive as some of the above examples, it's sufficient to do some serious damage.
- This section is redundant. With the exception of foreign language, almost all textbooks above elementary level qualify.
- Not exactly a textbook, but the Examination Regulations at Oxbridge, which at both Oxford and Cambridge are provided to all students, run to around 800 pages. As each subject has a much shorter handbook with only the relevant information, and it's all online anyway, the only use for the single volume is that it's the perfect size for jamming in a door-hinge to hold the door wide open. At some colleges its Bible-thin paper is also useful for lighting gas stoves. Some particularly stingy students have been known to try rolling cigarettes with it, to not jch effect. Before a serious pruning in the early Nineties the Oxford University statutes were said to be so long and so heavily amended (over 800 years, mind you) that nobody had ever read the lot, largely because much of the corpus referred to long-lost earlier bits.
Encyclopedias and Dictionaries
- The 1951 edition of the Webster's New World Dictionary of the American Language (Encyclopedic Edition) which is roughly 25cm long, 20cm wide, and at least 10cm thick. Broke the bank at a whopping two dollars.
- The Oxford English Dictionary, considered by many to be as close to an official dictionary of English as could be (since English, unlike French, has no official standards) is 23 volumes. The planned Third Edition is projected to cost about $55 million and the estimated date of completion is 2037.
- The text in the compact edition of the first edition Oxford English Dictionary has been shrunk to the point that you essentially need a magnifying glass to make use of it, and it still takes up two volumes that are big and heavy enough to be dangerous. Each volume clocks in at about 4,000 pages, and some editions come with a helpful magnifying glass.
- The Spanish Royal Academy dictionary is two tomes that amount to 3548 pages in font number 8.
- At least one edition of the Large Chinese-Norwegian Dictionary clocks in at 1408 pages.
- One Japanese-English kanji dictionary raises the bar to 1748. The severely abridged version still has 430.
- There is an encyclopedic dictionary of the Spanish language. It includes — aside from definitions — short biographies, maps, diagrams (including a full page schematic of a pocket watch); and the appendices include difficulties of the language, a preposition guide, and a compendium of Spanish conjugations (Spanish is a hard language). Everything in three volumes totalling 3200 pages.
- The Merck Index is about 2198 pages.
- A 130-year-old Encyclopedia Britannica is 25 volumes, with each one being eight to ten centimetres thick. And this was published in the late 1870s.
- The German dictionary and encyclopedia Grimm currently consists (it is still updated an added to) of about 35 books between five and ten cm thick. And this is the paperback edition.
- During the Ming Dynasty at least 3,000 scholars spent 4 years, beginning in 1403, to work on the Yongle Dadian, an encyclopedia with 11,095 volumes and 22,877 chapters. There are an estimated 370 million Chinese characters used.
- The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, the most comprehensive and authoritative overview of English grammar, clocks in at 1860 pages (and you thought your English class was hard).
- The Physicians' Desk Reference, a pharmaceutical reference, is provided annually, for free, to practicing physicians (at least in the United States). Because this information is available electronically, the (enormous◊) books are frequently given away, or used as literal paperweights and doorstoppers.
- The Oxford Classical Dictionary Third ed. is about 6 cm thick and has over 6000 entries on ancient Greek and Roman Civilizations if you ever needed a complete reference.
Close Encyclopedias and Dictionaries
Politics
- Title 26 of the US Code of Federal Regulations (also known as the Tax Code) weighs in at 13,458 pages, in 20 volumes. You can buy a copy from the US government printing office for about a grand.
- While we're at it, the European Constitution (which would have theoretically turned the EU into an actual nation) was slowly but effectively killed off because of its doorstopper length. By combining every single treaty used to establish the EU rather than simply overriding them and writing a single, universal treaty (strike 1), as well as integrating a new code of law with the constitution (strike 2), as well as several unnecessary charters including the words to the national anthem (strike 3! out), they manage to obfuscate normal citizens by the sheer size of the damn thing, which ended up causing the "No" votes in France and Netherlands.
- Speaking of constitutions, the Constitution of Alabama, the longest in-use constitution in the world, weighs in at over 350,000 words. It has 798 amendments, not including amendments 621 and 693, which do not exist. They cover everything from mosquito control taxes, to bingo, to protecting against "the evils arising from the use of intoxicating liquors at all elections," as well as the typical government operation stuff.
- Quite a few Alabamians have been trying to have the state constitution re-written for years, for just this reason. However, the die-hard conservative sector refuses to just let the damned thing die already.
- Hansard could very well count- it is a (near-) verbatim transcript of the deliberations and debates of the British Parliament, each individual hardback volume of which covers an entire year of debate within one House, although smaller, more frequent digests are available. To give people an idea of just how mammoth that is- each volume is around 12" by 6", and 2"-3" thick, and they go back over a century.
Tabletop Games
Video Games
- The first xBox console was met with derision for its size.
- The Instruction Manual for Sid Meier's Civilization IV gets an honourable mention for being thicker than most normal game boxes. Hence the reason it's kept as a file on the game disc.
- Even Civilization II: Multiplayer Gold Edition had an instruction manual at least as long as Hamlet - comprehensively covering how to install the game, play the tutorial, play the game without the tutorial, play multiplayer, and sub-guides to all of the scenarios.
- Falcon 4.0's 350-page three ring binder of a manual.
- Bizarrely, the official guide to Disgaea II is, well, the size of a small phone book. A game guide. Goes to show just how much is packed in that game.
- This fate also befalls most of the other game guides produced by publisher Doublejump Books, possibly because they have a habit of making guides for games with tons of data. After thoroughly "mining" the games for every formula and bit of data therein. They actually call the stats-bearing sections of their guides "The Data Mines". Doublejump books are also a smaller form factor than normal, sized to fit on top of the game's DVD case without any spillover to the sides, which adds to the page count immensely.
- The hardbacked Fallout 3 game-guide is an absurdity in terms of size. Seriously, the game, even with all optional missions just isn't that long, even if it can be very varied. Even so over 300 pages for any game is a hell of a lot.
- The manual for The Witcher is described by Yahtzee as "Thick enough to beat goats to death with." It is roughly a cm thick, mostly due to a partial walkthough.
- The old Where inTime is Carmen Sandiego game shipped with a full desk encyclopedia which served double duty as the lynchpin of the game's Copy Protection.
- The manual for Baldurs Gate II, a 300+-page comb-bound affair, is essentially a reprint of the 2nd Edition AD&D Player's Handbook.
- Planescape Torment contains 800,000 words. Not the guide. The game itself. You might not be able to stop a door with only 4 CDs, but damnit; the game's longer than Atlas Shrugged and reads like a Choose Your Own Adventure book; it deserves a honourable mention at least.
- The guide to Shin Megami Tensei Nocturne is advertised as "a 400 page monster."
Webcomics
- Parodied in Darths And Droids with the rulebook for grappling being (apparently) so large they actually comment on the size.
- Also parodied in Homestuck. John's copy of "Colonel Sassacre's Daunting Text of Magical Frivolty and Practical Japery" is not only described as being big enough to kill a cat if dropped on it, it is also the abridged version. His Nana died in an incident involving the unabridged version.
Western Animation
- Parodied in one episode of The Simpsons in which an "Angelica Button" book leaves an indent in asphalt when thrown out a car window.
Web Pages
- A website designer created a script that would create a webpage comparing every possible text color to every possible background color (16,777,216 colors each). The page that would have resulted was calculated to be more than 19 Peta Bytes in size — using the system of 1 KB = 1024 Bytes, 1 MB = 1024 KB, etc. The script was never run.
Real Life
- Ray Bradbury, author of Farenheit 451, actually spoke out in some notes at the end of one of the versions of his aforementioned book to voice his displeasure with the shortening and condensing of the classical works, which he complained removed every single detail and extra bit that made the books great. I'm sure that with the lengths of the books mentioned here... he would be proud.
- Somebody decided to print and bound part of the English Wikipedia. This was the result.
- If e-novels are allowed, Marienbad My Love *
Title abridged for conciseness, since a seven-thousand-word title would be annoying to scroll past probably counts, given that it is 17 million words long.
...Hey, let's get them all and build a fort!
We can even have Canon Towers!
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