We’ve entered the UK Blog Awards 2014. You can vote for us here. It’s quick and easy to vote for us, and in return, you’ll receive a free blogging ebook from the UK Blog Awards folk, which is rather nice.

However, we wouldn’t ask you to vote for us and offer only a free ebook for your trouble. So, here are some more wonderfully interesting literary facts for you, which we hope will convince you to take the trouble to reach for the vote button…

Where the Wild Things Are was originally titled ‘Where the Wild Horses Are’, but Maurice Sendak changed his mind as he couldn’t draw horses.

Harper Lee’s friend gave her a year’s wages for Christmas, on condition that she give up work and write. She wrote To Kill a Mockingbird.

Dickens’s house at Gad’s Hill reportedly had a secret door in the form of a fake bookcase. The fake books included titles such as ‘The Life of a Cat’ in 9 volumes.

Emily Bronte’s dog, Keeper, followed her coffin to the grave when she died and, for weeks after, moaned and howled outside her bedroom door.

Edgar Allan Poe coined the word ‘tintinnabulation’ to describe the sound made by the ringing of bells.

An Italian translation of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four has the clocks striking ‘uno’ instead of thirteen because ‘Italian clocks don’t go up to thirteen’ (missing the joke somewhat).

In one of Jane Austen’s first stories, ‘The Beautiful Cassandra’, the heroine (based on Jane’s sister) shoplifts a hat and punches a cook.

The Latin translation of Winnie-the-Pooh, entitled Winnie ille Pu, is the only Latin book to have made the New York Times Bestseller List.

Before finding fame as a novelist, Dan Brown was a pop singer. One of his solo albums was called Angels and Demons.

The memorial plaque to Emily Dickinson in Amherst, Massachusetts, composed by the poet herself, features just two words: ‘called back’.

If you enjoyed any of those literary factoids, we’d greatly appreciate it if you could take a few moments to vote for us so we stand a chance of winning in the Arts and Culture section of the blog awards. To vote for us, simply click on this link to take you to our page on the UK Blog Awards website. And thank you!

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