An Exhibition of Superlative Books: The Longest Book in the World

Guinness thinks ‘Remembrance of Things Past’ is the longest novel in the world, though Marcel Proust should talk to my daughter. Bridie is a devotee of Japanese manga and is currently working her way through ‘One Piece’, an action adventure picture saga with 99 collected tankoben, i.e. individual volumes, and counting (pictured). The author, Eiichiro Oda, and his artists seem to produce new instalments at a Dickensian speed, faster than their readers can keep up. The very same Guinness says ‘One Piece’ has "the most copies published for the same comic book series by a single author. As of February 2021, the manga had over 480 million copies in circulation in 43 countries worldwide, making it the best-selling manga series in history.” Proust would have things to say about Guinness, given that Wikipedia says the longest novel is ‘Venmurasu’ by the contemporary Tamil writer Jeyamohan, a renarration of the Indian classic, the Mahabharata. We should not be surprised by versions of the Mahabharata that are longer than the Mahabharata, when we consider Thomas Mann’s ‘Joseph and His Brothers’, a retelling of the Genesis story that, at 1200 pages, goes considerably longer than the original. Proust is eighth on the Wikipedia list, Mann’s novel tenth. There are road novels where we wish the satnav guided the author’s car into a lake. The quest for the longest book, as distinct from novel, can meet all sorts of ludicrous dead ends. We wonder if some titles of longest books don’t also bob up on lists of Most Unread Book. If we treat the title of a set as one book (see Proust), are some encyclopedias the longest in the world? Given the storage capacity of computers, there are writers now generating the longest book not as some creative trial but as a pastime. When we read of the lost works of ancient authors, we can only guess at the scale of the absence; just as it’s impossible to imagine a world in which Shakespeare’s works were accidentally lost. No point blaming a librarian for that! Wikipedia states, modestly, that Wikipedia is the longest encyclopedia, but to be fair does own up to the Yongle Dadian: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yongle_Encyclopedia In our long search for the longest our minds wander rather than wonder after a while. What, for example, is the longest unfolding book? The British artist David Hockney has been painting Normandy landscapes during the pandemic (pictured), inspired by the longest tapestry in the world (almost) at Bayeux. His folding French panorama could extend into the next province and still not be the longest unfolding book in the world. That claim probably goes to an unidentified orihon. Originating in the Tang Dynasty in China, the concept of writing on a roll then folding the pages to read at ease travelled to Japan where, in the form of the unfolding book, the books became known as orihon. The thought of orihons on horizons, zigzagging into space like moon-shot streamers, is attractive. We may never know the end of it, or necessarily want to.