Having grown up in a rare bookshop, the son of an antiquarian dealer, many interesting things have crossed my path.From maps showing South American giants, to witch-hunting manuals, to shipwreck diaries written in penguin blood, every kind of oddity crosses the rare-book counter at one time or another.I began by recording them in a box labelled ‘Interesting Things’. I had no agenda other than to record the existence of these things before they disappeared again behind the closed doors of private collections.When I moved to London to work for an auctioneering ­company, Interesting Things and its bulk of notebooks, ­folders and hard drives came with me and, inevitably, my ­collection expanded.My interests even led me to a job as a researcher and script writer on the BBC TV show QI, as a so-called ‘QI Elf’. So, it’s fair to say, I’ve got a few ‘fun facts’ up my sleeve. Here is a selection of the best ones I’ve collected. So, how many did you know? Which of these did Man leave on the Moon? A javelin, a gold olive branch or four armrests: The answer is all threeWorld in numbers0.5 per cent of the global male population are descended from Genghis Khan.0.7 per cent of the global ­population are drunk right now.Potatoes have two more chromosomes than humans.Andy Murray has three kneecaps.Singer Harry Styles has four nipples.20 per cent of British teenagers think Winston Churchill is a fictional character.Ed Sheeran can fit 55 ­Maltesers in his mouth.86 per cent of Fortune 500 executives (list of largest 500 U.S. companies) cheat at golf.145 pairs of underpants were buried with Tutankhamun.There are 421 Scottish words for snow.2.5million pulped Mills & Boon novels were mixed into the foundation of the M6 toll road to help bind the asphalt.A single town in China makes over one-third of the world’s socks. Datang, known as ‘Sock City’, in eastern ­Zhejiang province, is home to more than 10,000 businesses producing socks and stockings. Every year they churn out 27 billion socks.The UniverseHumans have so far left more than 187,400kg of material on the Moon, including a javelin, an olive branch made of gold, five American flags, four armrests and 96 bags of human waste.A 2019 YouGov survey found that 48 per cent of Britons would not want to go to the Moon even if their safety was guaranteed — 23 per cent were ‘not interested’, 11 per cent said there was ‘not enough to see or do on the Moon’ and 9 per cent didn’t see the point. Alien Abduction Insurance was first sold by Florida’s Saint Lawrence Insurance Agency in 1987The Moon has moonquakes, and stars have starquakes. The largest starquake occurred on December 27, 2004, about 42,000 light years away. It released an intense burst of gamma rays equivalent to 1037kW. If this had taken place within ten light years from Earth, all life on our planet would have been incinerated.Alien Abduction Insurance was first sold by Florida’s Saint Lawrence Insurance Agency in 1987. By 1994, an entity known as the ‘UFO Abduction Insurance Company’ claimed to have sold a similar policy to 34,000 Americans.The earliest unidentified ­flying object (UFO) sighting dates back to Ancient Rome: ‘Something that looked like ships gleamed down from the sky… ­Something that looked like a big fleet was said to have been seen in the sky at ­Lanuvium, near Rome.’The photons, particles of light, hitting your eye at this moment were flying past ­Mercury 5 ­minutes ago and left the Sun 8 minutes ago.The Sun isn’t yellow, it’s white – with a touch of turquoise.The average bolt of lightning carries 100 million volts and can instantly reach a temperature of 27,760C.As much as half of all the water on Earth may have originated as ice specks floating in an interstellar gas cloud in existence before our solar ­system. This means that there’s a 50:50 chance that the water in your glass is older than the Sun.Tomorrow will always be the longest day of your life. ­Billions of years ago, a day on Earth lasted 13 hours. Since then the Moon has been edging away from us at a rate of 38mm every year. This is because ­friction from tidal drag slightly reduces the energy with which the Earth rotates, while the Moon gains energy from this, moving it into slightly higher orbit. As Earth’s rotation slows, its days get slightly longer.HistoryNobody knows why ­Neanderthals went extinct. In a sense they haven’t entirely, as modern Europeans and Asians have about 1 per cent to 2 per cent Neanderthal DNA. Archaeologists have revealed that Neanderthals wore body glitter, jewellery, make-up and capes.Before it was known as The Big Apple, New York’s 19th-­century nickname was The Big Onion, as there were so many layers to explore.Napoleon’s penis, which enjoys its own Wikipedia page, has passed through a lot of hands since its theft during his autopsy. It most recent owner, the daughter of a New Jersey urologist, was offered $100,000 but is yet to sell. Sharks are older than trees. Fossil evidence for them dates back as far as 450 million years. Some 30 million years later the first plant life arrivedWhen the Aztec Empire was founded in 1427, Oxford ­University was at least 330 years old.The vending machine is almost 2,000 years old – the first known example was invented by Hero of Alexandria in AD60 to dispense holy water when a coin was inserted into a slot.Sharks are older than trees. Fossil evidence for them dates back as far as 450 million years. Some 30 million years later the first plant life arrived.Genghis Khan killed so many people that he cooled the planet. A 2020 study found that, as a result of the ­40 million people who died during the Mongol invasion headed by Khan, huge areas of cultivated land returned to forest. This absorbed an estimated ­700 million tonnes of carbon from the atmosphere.During World War II Jack Warner, President of Warner Bros, was worried Japanese bombers would mistake his buildings for the nearby ­Lockheed aircraft factory, so he had a six metre arrow painted on his roof with an enormous sign that read ‘LOCKHEED THATAWAY’.Since 1950, the U.S. has ­misplaced at least six nuclear weapons that have never been recovered.U.S. President Jimmy Carter once sent off his jacket to be dry-cleaned, only later realising that he’d left ‘the biscuit’ (the nickname for a laminated card with the codes to the country’s nuclear arsenal) in one of its pockets.The BodyThe entire world’s supply of Viagra and Botox is made in Ireland.There is gold in humans. A body weighing 70kg will on average contain a total of about 0.2mg of gold. The ­precious metal is instrumental in the transmission of electrical signals through the body.About 150 cases of leprosy are reported in the U.S. each year. One-fifth of those cases are reported in Florida.While wintering in Antarctica, Dr Leonid Rogozov (1934-2000) was forced to remove his own appendix in 1961. Ever since then, doctors staying at Antarctic ­stations in winter have had to have their appendices removed before arrival.Fingerprints, sometimes called ‘chanced impressions’, are formed by the friction from ­touching the walls of our mother’s womb. By week 19, they’re set. This is why prints are unique to every person, even for genetically identical twins.AnimalsIn recent films Godzilla is about 105m tall, which means the monster weighs 20,000 tonnes, or about 100 blue whales. To sustain this mass, Godzilla would need to eat about 25 tonnes of food for 20 million calories a day – the same requirements as a town of 10,000 people.The first to test the ejector seat of a U.S. Air Force jet was a two-year-old black bear named Yogi on March 21, 1962. Yogi touched down dazed but unharmed 7 minutes, 49 ­seconds later.In 2014 a pine tree planted in a Los Angeles park in memory of George Harrison was destroyed by beetles.Every English elm tree of today is descended from a single tree transported by the Romans to Britain in order to support and train vines.Cats can technically be classified as a liquid as well as a solid. Physicist Marc-Antoine Fardin demonstrated that, with their ability to fill the small containers they habitually jump into, felines fit the ­necessary ­criteria of liquids.Rudolph the red-nosed ­reindeer is female, as are all the other reindeers that pull the sleigh of Father Christmas. We know this by the way they are always depicted as having antlers. Male reindeer use their antlers to fight each other during the autumnal ­breeding season, but by ­Christmas they have cast them off. Only females retain them in winter.Art and wordsThe Mona Lisa is the only ­painting of the more than 1 million artworks in the collection of the Louvre to have ever been given its own postboy to cope with the amount of love letters from admirers.Romance novelist Barbara Cartland holds the record for most books published in one year, producing 23 in 1976. Donald Trump had his Twitter (now X) account hacked by a Dutchman who guessed his ­password to be ‘yourefired’, his catchphrase from The ­ApprenticeHapax legomenon is the term for a word that occurs only once in a written work, or the total works of an author. The words ‘girl’ and ‘boy’ occur only once in the Bible. Only one ‘burp’ features in Shakespeare’s works, and it’s emitted by Sir Toby Belch in Twelfth Night.Donald Trump had his Twitter (now X) account hacked by a Dutchman who guessed his ­password to be ‘yourefired’, his catchphrase from The ­Apprentice. Two years later, the same hacker guessed the new password as ‘maga2020!’.In 2013 it was revealed in a court case that footballer Wayne Rooney’s password was ‘Stella Artois’.Adapted from The Most Interesting Book In The World by Edward Brooke-Hitching (Simon & Schuster, £14.99). © Edward Brooke-Hitching 2024. To order a copy for £13.49 (offer valid to 19/10/24; UK P&P free on orders over £25) go to www.mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937.