Doorstopper: Difference between revisions

 

 

 

Proper Doorstoppers (also known as Tree Killers) should be over 500 pages. If one book is over 1,000 pages, it is probably a '''Doorstopper'''. This goes double if the [[Useful Notes/Fonts|typeface]] is smaller than 10 point.

When a character takes this trope a little too literally, see [[Useful Book]]. Extremely useful if one wishes to [[Throw the Book At Them]].

 

 

{{examples}}

* Jeff Smith's ''[[Bone]]''. Other [[Comic Books]] can—and have—run longer, but few of them are published as a single-volume, 1,300 page tome.

* The ''[[Cerebus the Aardvark]]'' "phone book" collections; all but the thinnest four he has, indeed, seen stop doors. And they're trade paperbacks!

* The complete collected edition of ''[[From Hell]]''.

* The Marvel Omnibuses, massive collections of selections of various series, tend to be hefty. The Hulk omnibus, for example, weighs six pounds.

** As of December 2011 the largest published is the collection of the complete run of Peter Milligan's and Mike Allred's ''[[X-Force|X-Force/X-Statix]]'' series, as well as related spin-offs, at over 1200 pages.

* ''Comic Book Tattoo'', a collection of short stories based on songs by [[Tori Amos]], is both thick and ''wide'', making it absolutely massive...and a great prop for using one's laptop on the bed.

* The Flight Anthologies more often than not deserve this status, as do the Popgun anthologies.

* The collected editions of Richard Starking's ''[[Elephantmen]]'' comics, they also usually come out in hardback first so they're quite heavy.

* The collected edition ''Toda [[Mafalda]]'', with practically all the strips starring the Argentinian girl.

* The ''[[The Walking Dead]]'' Omnibus collects 24 issues, and is officially described as being "perfect for long time fans, new readers and anyone needing a heavy object with which to fend off The Walking Dead."

** And then there's ''[[The Walking Dead]]'' compendium, which is 48 issues, collected in one volume.

* The aptly named Gold Brick collections of Antarctic Press's ''[[Gold Digger (Comic Book)|Gold Digger]]'' are 25 issues each.

 

* Video game [[novelization]]s almost inevitably fall under this trope, by the nature of the format.

* The released chapters of ''[[Misfiled Dreams]]'' run 456 pages, including 2 blank pages in the first chapter and 5 pages of art. The ''unreleased'' (and unedited) chapters run another '''616''' pages and counting.

 

=== Less Than 250K Words ===

* ''[[Tiberium Wars]]'' is 24 chapters long and is clocking at over 200,000 words.

* ''[[The Dream Land Story]]''. It's 87 (gradually-increasing-in-length) chapters, and 121,171 words long, made even crazier by the fact that it's a ''[[Kirby]]'' fanfic. (And it ''works!'')

** The Russian original of ''Offensive Care'' has 176,362 words. The author's own English translation grew slightly beyond 200,000 words.

* ''[[Thawing Permafrost]]'' is by no means a titan like the rest on this list, but it still qualifies as a door-stopper and the longest Mizore-centric fic in the '''[[Rosario + Vampire]]'' category (132,909 words, 35 chapters across 518 pages, according to the author).

 

=== 250K-499K Words ===

* The ''[[Firefly]]'' fanfic ''[[Forward]]'' is 458,608 words in length.

* One particularly high quality fanfic in the ''[[Swat Kats]]'' section is [http://www.fanfiction.net/s/3849671/1/SWAT_Kats_Endgame Endgame], which is complete at 474,707 words and 70 chapters (for those who bean count, that's 6768.8 words per chapter nearly).

* [http://www.fanfiction.net/s/2426552/1/Kim_Possible_Mind_body_and_Soul Mind, Body, and Soul], a ''[[Kim Possible]]'' fan fiction that's NSFW, clocks in at 450,669 words.

* ''[[Dissidia Final Fantasy]]'' fanfiction ''[[Shards of Memory]]'' ended at 41 chapters and over 275,000 words. The epilogue itself almost hits 17,000 words, twice the length of even the longest chapters up until then.

* Superstarultra's ''[[You Got Haruhi Rolled]]''. Over 300,000 words long and still not done. It has 86 chapters, but individual chapters were still pretty short until chapter 72. A very large percentage of its length is in the last few chapters.

* ''[[Constant Temptation]]'', a ''[[Death Note]]'' fanfic has 102 chapters and is over 300,000 words. That's not counting the Sequel and the Deleted Scenes...

* The shortest completed ''[[Poke Wars]]'' arc by Cornova is ''The Incipience'' at 55,073 words long. If all the completed arcs are added up, it comes out to a total of 340,186 words.

* ''[[Here in My Arms]]'' has 371,609 words.

* ''[[Hitchups]]'' is 40 chapters long, with 329,533 words that make up the entirety of the fic. In the [[How to Train Your Dragon (animation)|How to Train Your Dragon]] ff.net archive in the stories over 100,000 words, it is currently the second-longest story there, after ''The Truth is a Shard of Ice'' by Whitefang333.

 

=== 500K-749K Words ===

* The ''[[Harry Potter]]'' fanfic ''[[Hogwarts Exposed]]'' is over 700,000 words. It would be much shorter if not for the rampant [[Department of Redundancy Department|redundancy]] and [[Filler]], of course.

* ''[http://www.mediaminer.org/fanfic/view_st.php?id=49664&submit=View Par Tout Autre Nom]'', a crossover between ''[[Inuyasha]]'' and ''[[Yu Yu Hakusho]]'', is around 500,000 words long.

* The ''[[Total Drama Comeback]]'' series is composed of the first saga, one of the only complete alternate-seasons at over 370,000 words, and the second fic ''Total Drama Battlegrounds'' has over 550,000 words.

* ''[[Nobody Dies]]'' is 105 chapters and 596,438 words long.

* ''[[Kyon: Big Damn Hero]]'': reaching the story's [[In Medias Res]] took nearly 500,000 words. 600+ ''A4'' pages, if you plan on printing it.

* ''[[A Growing Affection]]'' is over 700,000 words long, and at the time of this post is the fifth longest ''[[Naruto]]'' fanfic on FanFiction.net.

* The ''[[Code Geass]]'' fanfic ''[[Dauntless]]'' is at over 670,000 words in 98 chapters.

* ''[[Blood That Flows]]'' is, without a question, the longest ''[[Lyrical Nanoha]]'' fanfic on FanFiction.net. Over 200 chapters alone and over 500,000 words. The only ''Nanoha'' fanfic that comes close is the ''[[Deva Series]]'', where, if you add up all four parts, there are more words than ''Blood That Flows'', but it still has less chapters.

* ''[[Drunkard's Walk]]'' already qualifies for this section despite being nowhere near complete. ''Drunkard's Walk II'' is complete at just over 320k words, and ''Drunkard's Walk V'' is complete at just over 171k words. As of December 2019, ''Drunkard's Walk S'', ''Drunkard's Walk VIII'', and ''Drunkard's Walk XIII'' were still in progress: ''S'' at about 42.5k words in 2 chapters, ''VIII'' at 116.8k words in 4 chapters, and ''XIII'' at 23k words in one chapter. The other nine arcs do not have any published chapters as of December 2019, but there are five "Steplets" with 7.3k words between them. And none of these numbers include the various concordances or fan-written additions. So: one story in many arcs, over half of which are completely unpublished, with over 680k words so far in what has seen the light of day.

 

=== 750K-999K Words ===

* ''[[Prince of the Dark Kingdom]]'', a ''[[Harry Potter]]'' fic, certainly qualifies, at 117 chapters and 832,144 words.

* Vathara's [[Love It or Hate It|controversial]] fanfic ''[[Embers]]'' boasts over 750,000 words.

* ''[[Dragon Age: The Crown of Thorns]]'' has over 980,000 words.

 

=== More Than 1M Words ===

* ''[[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''.

** ''[http://www.fanfiction.net/s/2053520/1/Latias_Journey Latias' Journey]'', weighing in at 1,186,409 words.

** ''[http://www.fanfiction.net/s/4319623/1/Brave_New_World Brave New World]'', surpassing it with 1,682,467 words.

*** ''[[Brave New World (fanfic)|Brave New World]]'', 2,404,050 words long, happens to be the sequel to ''[[Latias' Journey]]'', resulting in a combined length of almost 3 million words.

* ''[[Yet again, with a little extra help]]'' is over a million words long.

* ''[[Yu-Gi-Oh!]]'' fanfic ''[[Skin (fanfic)|Skin]]'' is around 1.8 million long.

* The [[Recursive Fanfiction]] ''[[Fallout Equestria: Project Horizons]]'' has passed ''[[Fallout Equestria]]'' itself, at around 1,300,000 words.

* The ''Halo'' fanfiction ''[[The Life]]'' has around 1,600,000 words. It is the longest story in the Halo fanfiction.net archive.

 

== Literature ==

** Amusingly, the CD version of it is just as bad. Those wafer thin CDs stack pretty high when there's ''45 of them.'' Similarly [[The Fountainhead]] audiobook clocks in at frankly absurd 32 hours.

* ''[[Battle Royale]]'' is 619 pages long, and it's mostly about students killing each other.

* The ultimate example is [[wikipedia:Henry Darger|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 [[wikipedia:Outsider art|created thousands of illustrations for the novel]], and also wrote a ten-year weather journal and a 5,084 page book about his life, simply called ''[http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_hvV0JHPYX_I/R3Y0UC3JROI/AAAAAAAAANg/9O7U_jEXss8/s400/History+of+My+Life+%28Volumes+1+3729_b.jpg The History of My Life.]''

* The complete adventures of ''[[Sherlock Holmes]]'' amounts to over 1200 very large pages of very small text.

** The first book is often printed on bible-style thin paper, with a small font size. If you buy the rest of the books from the same publisher, more often than not, the first book doesn't stand out in size. Indeed, it is often at size parity with ''Dune Messiah'' and smaller than ''Children of Dune''. Pick it up, however, and you'll be surprised at its weight.

** The first book was originally conceived and serialized (in ''Analog'' magazine) as two separate novels, ''Dune World'' and ''The Prophet of Dune''. The book seamlessly combines both texts and adds a whole wad of appendices.

{{quote|''"...thick runs the plot, and the spine..."''}}

** This is to the point where the final book is so long, the [[Film of the Book]] is confirmed to adapt the story into ''two different movies''. Though this may also be due to it being a massive [[Cash Cow Franchise]], and fans being fed up with [[Compressed Adaptation]]s. And also because they need to fix the [[Adaptation-Induced Plothole|Adaptation Induced Plot Holes]].

** It goes beyond that. It also delves into geography, philosophy, religion, race relations, the nature of civilization versus savagery...

** There are some scholars who think Melville intended the book to be an ''encyclopedia of everything he knew.''

** Technically it is six books and an appendix volume. The hardcover anniversary set, which is divided into seven volumes, can actually stop a door, as can the new 1178 page single-volume edition.

* Anything written by the author [[Tad Williams]] end up like this.

* ''[[Battlefield Earth]]''.

* ''[[Mission Earth]]'', a dekalogy<ref>"Dekalogy: A novel in ten volumes"</ref> by [[L. Ron Hubbard]], who also wrote ''[[Battlefield Earth]]''.

* ''Pandora's Star'' and ''Judas Unchained'' by Peter F. Hamilton, each clocking in at around 1,200 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 [http://www.unshelved.com/archive.aspx?strip=20080309 more like one book. Trust the voice of experience.]

* Anything [[Tom Clancy]] has ever written. Partially excused because they are ALL a combination of slow burning political thriller and hawkish military fantasy. It would only take minor re-writes to split almost every book into two separate books.

** Ben from ''[[My Family]]'' is seen reading ''The Bear and The Dragon'' at bedtime for ''two entire seasons'', though it doesn't help that he's always being badgered by his [[Control Freak]] wife Susan. It's eventually [[Lampshade Hanging|lampshaded]] when he chooses it as his book when Susan decides to start a book club, much to her [[True Art|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.

** It seems that that after ''[[The Hunt for Red October]]'', Tom Clancy's [[Protection From Editors|editor just ''up and died'']], and publishers now just print his first drafts. Especially noticeable 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 [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwAOc4g3K-g summarizing the whole thing in 15 seconds.]

* ''[[Earth's Children|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. You could chop a good 50 pages off of the series just by omitting all [[IKEA Erotica|descriptions of genitals.]]

** ''The Land of Painted Caves'', the sixth and final novel in the book, would be half as long if Ayla hadn't introduced herself, explained her backstory, and explained how she got Wolf every time she met someone new, and if every cave wasn't described in minute detail despite them all being fairly similar.

* Ditto for the ''Iron Tower Trilogy'', which is an even more blatant <s>ripoff</s> 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.

* The unpublished ''[[Stephen Colbert]]'s Alpha Squad 7: Lady Nocturne: A Tek Jansen Adventure'' is an extremely hefty paperback in the style of men's adventure pulp novels. 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''.

* [[Philip K. Dick]]'s unfinished ''Exegesis'' was said to be around 8,000 pages long before he died. ''Eight '''thousand'''''.<ref>It would have been an Olympic Record but he failed the drugs test.</ref>

* 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. He had planned to write seven volumes, [[Author Existence Failure|but couldn't finish them]].

* The Complete Works of [[Plato]], in an incredibly small type-face, clock at just under two thousand pages on a page size just under A4. This is without any [[Footnote Fever|Footnotes]] or annotations.

* 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.

* The ''[[Twilight (novel)|Twilight]]'' series, especially the later books. ''Breaking Dawn'' takes the cake at 752 pages.

** See also Stephenie Meyer's ''[[The Host (novel)|The Host]]'' for adults.

* ''[[Don Quixote]]'' (''The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote of La Mancha'') by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra is quite long, since it was originally two volumes which are now usually printed together.

* ''[[Gone with the Wind]]'' by Margaret Mitchell is just over 1000 pages.

* [[James Ellroy]]'s ''[[L.A. 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.

* [[James Joyce]]'s ''[[Ulysses]]'' - nearly 1000 pages with notes, and you'd better believe you need them.

*** Much more difficult to read would be closer to the mark.

* 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. And, like the ''[[Harry Potter]]'' books, this is ''also'' a kid's book (more or less).

* Any one book of Colleen McCullough'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!

* ''[[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 "[[Hand of Thrawn|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.

* The collected ''[[Chronicles of Thomas Covenant]]'' by Stephen Donaldson could stop bullets.

** To visualize that, the book is ''over a foot thick.''

* Samuel Delany's ''[[Dhalgren]]'' runs to about 800 pages.

* ''[[The Mahabharata]]'' and the ''[[Ramayana]]'' fall under this. Mahabharata itself has a total of 1.8 million words, one hundred thousand proses, and long long prose passages. Ramayana, in comparison, only has 24,000 verses.

* The complete printed text of ''[[Varney the Vampire]]'', compiling a 220-chapter "penny dreadful" serial from the early 1800s, runs on (and on and on) for some 868 double-column pages.

* ''The Good Soldier Švejk'' by Jaroslav Hašek is over 700 pages long, and it's not even finished, due to [[Author Existence Failure|Hašek's death]].

* ''[[Swan Song (novel)|Swan Song]]'', by Robert McCammon. The paperback edition is 956 pages.

** He's no slouch at this, as "The Queen of Bedlam" is 656 pages in paperback. Its prequel, "Speaks the Nightbird" is 816 pages and was originally released in two volumes.

* ''[[Duncton Wood]]'' chronicles the ''entire'' life story of a pair of moles, from their birth to their death, so it's no wonder it's around 800 pages.

* ''[[Perry Rhodan]]'' has to be the ultimate example. An on-going German science-fiction EPIC that calls itself the biggest science-fiction series for a reason. Since 1961 there's been over 2500 weekly novella-sized, pulp booklets released. These issues have been collected in books of about 400 pages long each. There's been over one hundred of these books released and that still only covers about a third of the whole series.

* ''[[The Inkworld Trilogy|Inkheart, Inkspell]]'', and ''[[The Inkworld Trilogy|Inkdeath]]'' are 534, 635, and 683 pages respectively. ''[[Dragonrider]]'', which was written by the same author, is 536 pages. Individually, none of these books could actually stop a door, but two or three piled on top of each other probably could.

* ''[[The Stone Dance of the Chameleon]]'': three books, the shortest of which is just over 700 pages.

* [[John Ringo]]'s novels tend to be somewhat long but not long enough to qualify, in general; however, the last two books of the original set for the [[Posleen War Series]], ''Hell's Faire'' and ''When the Devil Dances'', were originally to be one novel. The events of 9/11 threw off Ringo's muse, [[Word of God|according to him in the afterword for HF]], and the work was broken up to get a book to the printers before it got ridiculously late (instead of the actual somewhat late).

* Gertrude Stein's ''The Making of Americans'' clocks in at a solid 925 pages, and also has the benefit of being written in abstract prose that's [[True Art Is Incomprehensible|completely incomprehensible]].

* Michelle West's epic fantasy series ''[[The Sun Sword]]'' definitely counts. The shortest book in it is 687 pages, the other five range from 737-957 pages. To top it off, the longest book in the series (''The Sun Sword'', the sixth and final book) also has smaller font than the other five books (which didn't exactly have large font before. I'd guess it to be 8-point font.). Slightly averted in that they're only available as mass-market paperbacks so one wouldn't be much of a weapon. All six together though? Be afraid, be very afraid.

* Richard Bausch's ''Hello to the Cannibals'' is 840 pages long.

* ''[[Buddenbrooks]]'' by Thomas Mann.

* Both of the ''King Killer Chronicle'' books thus far have been extremely long. The hardcover version of ''[[The Wise Man's Fear]]'' is 994 pages long.

** [http://www.goblinscomic.com/03032011/ Yup.]

* Every book in ''[[The Wars Of Light And Shadow]]'' qualifies, but special honor has to go to the second book, ''Ships of Merior''. That one had to be divided into two volumes when released in paperback format, entitled ''Ships of Merior'' and ''Warhosts of Vastmark''.

* Both ''[[The Pillars of the Earth]]'' and its sequel ''[[World Without End]]'' easily hit 900+ pages each.

* While not as hefty as some other entries on the list, ''[[The Dream Merchant]]'' still manages to clock in a respectable 640 pages.

* [[Tyra Banks]]' novel ''[[Modelland]]'' is 576 pages.

* ''101 Years' Entertainment'' (edited by Ellery Queen) contains 995 pages of detective stories of varying quality.

* The Ultimate edition of ''[[The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy]]'' (containing all five books) honestly isn't too bad at just over 800 pages. But the in-universe reference guide from which the series takes its name is so long that if it weren't electronic it would allegedly take up several large buildings. And there are even longer books about life, the universe, and everything.

* ''The Endymion Omnibus'' by Dan Simmons, which contains ''Endymion'' and its sequel ''The Rise of Endymion'', is a few pages shy of the 1000-page mark, and definitely of doorstopper thickness.

* Many of [[NUMA Series|Clive Cussler]]'s novels are this. From ''Treasure'' onward, they're routinely over 500 pages long.

 

 

* ''The [[New York Times]]'' and ''The [[Washington Post]]'' were Doorstoppers until quite recently (the last two serious newspapers in the U.S., and 25¢ in the case of the Post) when a combination of the ad-killing recession, Franchise Decay (the ''Post'' laid off half its reporters the minute it no longer had a serious newspaper competior) and the foolish decision to split up its content into multiple formats (half the articles are now available for free in subway editions, and the front page actually ''tells you'' to go online to read an article accompanying a photo for a paper you just bought!) the result, needless to say has been a precipitous decline in volume and content from over 100 pages an issue to something like 25.

* 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.

* ''[[Vogue]]'' is generally on the thick side, but its annual Spring and Fall fashion issues are always the magazine's 800-lb gorillas. Or should it be, ''500-page'' gorillas. Most of it is ads, which you can't even call padding because it's an essential part of the magazine. But still, the ''table of contents'' doesn't even start until page 100 or so!

* While ''[[Playboy]]'' usually goes over a 100 pages, sometimes it reaches the 250-300 mark (most are advertising to maintain such a number of articles/pictorials, but still!).

 

* ''Financial Accounting'' by Warren et al., 888 pages. ''Intermediate Accounting'' by Kieso et al., 800 pages. ''Cost Accounting'' by Horngren et al., 896 pages. ''Advanced Accounting'' by Beams et al., 864 pages.

* FORTRAN manuals, one assumes, should simply be left atop the VAX while the forklift moves it.

* The ISO C++ language ''specification'' - not how to ''use'' C++, just defining what it is - weighs in at over 1300 pages. ANSI Common Lisp's specification is even longer.<ref>Amusingly, the other popular flavour of Lisp, "Scheme", is specified in only 50 pages, much of which is repetition.</ref>

* Not just computing, but natural sciences as well. ''Gravitation'' by Misner, Thorne and Wheeler is ''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.

* ''Reclaiming History'' by Vincent Bugliosi. This painstakingly comprehensive 1,600+ page book on all aspects of the [[John F. Kennedy|JFK]] [[Who Shot 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.

* This is hardly unusual for cookbooks—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. (Legend has it that when Gibbon presented a copy to King George III, the monarch groaned "Another damn, thick, square book! Always scribble, scribble, scribble, eh, Mr. Gibbon?")

* ''Windows Server 2008 Unleashed!'' is over 1600 pages long.

** The [[wikipedia:Linux kernel|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.

*** Source code is text, and text tends to compress quite well. That 58MB of compressed source code could easily expand out to half a gigabyte.

* 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.

* 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 much 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) that nobody had ever read the lot, largely because much of the corpus referred to long-lost earlier bits.

** When they said they were reinventing mathematics from "the basics," they weren't kidding. The proof that 1+1=2 comes no earlier than page 362.

** And after all that, Kurt Gödel [[Logic Bomb|proved that it was impossible for their work to be both consistent and complete]].

* The third edition of Mark Lutz's ''Programming Python'' is 1552 pages long. Somewhat excused because it covers many applications of Python (system tools, guis, client-side internet applications, server-side internet applications, databases, data structures, language processing, integrating into C), but still. Tape it shut, put a handle on it and it becomes a sledgehammer.

* The definitive work on quality assurance/quality control, ''Juran's Quality Handbook'' (5th ed.) is 1699 pages long. The eBook edition (PDF format) is around 20 MB. All editions are similarly-sized. A handbook for Sasquatch, perhaps...

* The eighth edition of ''A History of World Societies'' has 1089 pages.

* ''Machinery's Handbook'' is a one-stop volume for all things mechanical. Extremely common for almost any tradesman to have around, it will even show you how to estimate the volume of a pile of dirt. The 27th Edition clocks in at 2587 pages, with another 100 pages of index. The "Pocket Version" is a 4 inch thick monster that is sometimes sold with an attached magnifier to read the text.

* [[Dichter Und Denker|German philosopher]] Oswald Spengler's book about philosophy, history and many other topics ''[[The Decline of the West]]'' has more than 1000 pages, in small print.

* The [http://www.amazon.com/International-Statistical-Classification-Diseases-Problems/dp/9241547669/ref=sr_1_8?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1296612571&sr=1-8 complete revised ICD-10] comes to 1400 pages in length, including two hundred pages of instructions. For quick look up you might want to buy the index, which comes as a separate '''nine hundred''' page volume.

* Studying Shakespeare? You'll probably use the sixth edition of ''The Complete Shakespeare'' or the second edition of ''The Riverside Shakespeare'', both of which cover over 2000 pages.

* ''United States History'' by Pearson Education is 1264 pages long, not including the Table of Contents (31 pages) and the weird-ass "Skills Handbook" (32 pages). So in actuality, the textbook is 1327 pages long.

 

== Toys ==

** The set itself contained 5219 pieces and retailed for 500 US dollars.

 

== Video Games ==

* 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.

* Consider the sheer amount of text that goes into something like ''[[Mass Effect]]'' or ''[[Dragon Age]]''. Then consider how much of a typical novel is dialogue and how much is description. Given the amount of [[Scenery Porn]] in such places as the Collector base and the Deep Roads, both of those games qualify.

* 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 [[Lampshade Hanging|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 manual for ''[[The Witcher]]'' is described by [[Zero Punctuation|Yahtzee]] as "Thick enough to beat goats to death with." It is roughly a cm thick, mostly due to a partial walkthough.

* ''[[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 an honourable mention ''at least.''

* The guide to ''[[Shin Megami Tensei Nocturne]]'' is advertised as "a 400 page monster."

* ''[[Pokémon Diamond and Pearl|Pokémon Platinum]]'''s official strategy guide is 650+ pages.

** ''[[Pokémon Mystery Dungeon Explorers]] of Sky'''s strategy guide is about as thick as an average ''phone book''.

* There's a ''PSX Gamer's Guide'' which is a generally not-very-detailed walkthrough for a plethora of different [[PS 1]] games. The guide has 688 pages and 270 games covered, though, so you can't say it doesn't have that going for it.

* The manual for ''Master of Magic'' was 154 pages, complete with 40 pages of appendices, and took up most of a large box. The official ''strategy guide'' was another 478 pages of detailed tables and descriptions of every spell, race, unit, building, status, combat action, and their interactions, plus an errata listing (some of which were fixed in later patches).

* [[Square Enix]]'s ''Ultimania'' for the ''[[Final Fantasy]]'' series (as well their other RPGs like ''[[Dragon Quest]]'') are known for having a BOATLOAD of details that range from interviews, concept art, game stats, and strategies.

** Sometimes, they'll include incredibly important plot/world/character details that settle huge fandom debates or explain major plot holes. And they're never released outside of Japan. Everyone else has to rely on translators and scans.

 

* The play time for ''[[Fate/stay night]]'' is usually put at about three full days, so at least seventy hours of straight play time. And that's skipping scenes that occur in the multiple routes.

** The sequel, ''[[Fate/hollow ataraxia]],'' is also notoriously long. While the main story is straightforward enough, there are an awful lot of bonus scenes and similar things.

* ''[[Umineko no Naku Koro ni]]'' clocks at around a 6 MB text file for all Episodes—compare [[War and Peace]] which is around 3.2 MB worth of text. On the upside, the novel is pretty linear until the eighth Episode.

 

* Parodied in ''[[Darths and Droids]]'' with the rulebook for ''[[Grappling with Grappling Rules|grappling]]'' being (apparently) so large they actually comment on the size.

* ''[[Homestuck]]'' packs this trope on several different levels.

** First off, if ''Homestuck'' itself were turned into a book ([http://www.topatoco.com/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Store_Code=TO&Product_Code=MSPA-HOMESTUCK-BOOK01&Category_Code=MSPA-BOOKS which it actually is]) it would make the fair Colonel's treaty look like a children's book. To wit: as of January 2012, it weighted in at around 370,000 words long; as a point of comparison, ''[[War and Peace]]'' is around 450,000-600,000 depending on the translation.

*** And, ''[[War and Peace]]'' isn't illustrated on each page...

** Another Doorstopper is seen later, this time a guide for the "~ATH" programming language. It has an ability to break through ''a floor'' after being dropped for two times. And since on Alternia most trolls and their animal guardians own houses several stories high, you don't want to mess with the book on the top floor.

* Mentioned in a ''[[Nodwick]]'' comic where Artax uses a Robert Jordan novel as a bludgeon.

* The ''[[Gunnerkrigg Court]]'' [[Webcomic Print Collection|books]] aren't that long with less than 300 pages each. But the paper quality is so good that they're freakin' heavy.

 

== Web Original ==

* If the entirety of the ''[[Darwin's Soldiers]]'' RPs were to be printed out, it would take 400 pages to print out the second one and ''over 900'' pages to print the final one.

 

== Western Animation ==

* Parodied in one episode of ''[[The Simpsons (animation)|The Simpsons]]'' in which an "''[[Harry Potter|Angelica Button]]''" book leaves an indent in asphalt when thrown out a car window.

 

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[[Category:Bookish Tropes]]