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{{trope}}{{outdated}}
[[File:
{{quote|''"The covers of this book are too far apart."''
|'''[[Ambrose Bierce]]'''}}
A common literary term that refers to a book so thick and heavy that it can be used as a '''[[Exactly What It Says on the Tin|doorstopper]]'''. Or a [[Throw the Book At Them|weapon]]. Or a method with which to [[The Best Page in The Universe|give a chiropractor a job]]. 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 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.
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* 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 ''[[Judge Dredd]]'' complete case files. Each one contains a year's worth of storylines. And don't even get started on the upcoming{{when}} ''[[Meltdown Man]]'' graphic novel.
* Although not really a Doorstopper, [[Neil Gaiman]]'s introduction to ''[[Sandman|The Kindly Ones]]'' states that the hardcover version of the book is heavy enough to stun a burglar in the dark, which has always been his definition of true art.
* 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."
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* The "Ultimate Collection" volumes for UDON's ''[[Street Fighter]]'' comics are roughly the size of an average text book. And cost $60 each, making them similar in price as well.
* The aptly named Gold Brick collections of Antarctic Press's ''[[Gold Digger (Comic Book)|Gold Digger]]'' are 25 issues each.
== Fan Works ==
* 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 [https://web.archive.org/web/20190823144159/https://www.fanfiction.net/book/Harry_Potter/10/0/1/1/1084/0/0/0/0/1/ one] ''[[Harry Potter]]'' story longer than ''the entire 1,084,000-word series''. [https://web.archive.org/web/20190823144242/https://www.fanfiction.net/book/Harry_Potter/10/0/1/1/255/0/0/0/0/1/ 582] stories are longer than the 255,000-word ''Order of the Phoenix'', the longest in the series, many of these incomplete. At least seventeen FF.Net stories have over a million words, with the ''[[Ah! My Goddess]]'' fanfic ''[[Trial
** [https://web.archive.org/web/20121018213649/http://www.fanfiction.net/community/Longest_Stories/64113/ Here's fanfiction.net group dedicated to very long stories on the site.]
* 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.
* ''[[The Unity Saga]]''
=== Less Than 250K Words ===
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* ''[https://web.archive.org/web/20120805213048/http://www.fanfiction.net/s/4424201/1/ Teaching Darkness: Memories]'' by RaeLogan is over 206,000 words, and itself is '''part 5''' in a series, with the previous story at only a little over 52,000 (at least a quarter of its sequel's size!).
* ''[[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).
* The prologue, eleven chapters and one untitled side story which comprise the [[Dead Fic|abandoned]] ''[[Ranma ½]]/[[Sailor Moon]]'' crossover fic ''[[Relatively Absent]]'' work out to something in the vicinity of 150,000 words.
* ''[[Isekai by Moonlight]]'' has 196,464 words as of the end of Chapter 5.
=== 250K-499K Words ===
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* ''[[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.
* ''[[The Neo-Domino Purge]]'' is putting up a challenge for the longer ''[[Yu-Gi-Oh!]]'' fanfics, at around 399,000 words.
* ''[[The Girl Who Loved]]'', a ''[[Harry Potter]]/[[Sailor Moon]]/[[Ranma ½]]'' crossover by "Darth Drafter" comes in at 401,335 words across its two parts.
* ''[[Hermione Granger and the Swiss Tournament]]'', a ''[[Harry Potter]]/[[James Bond]]'' fusion story that is part of [[The Teraverse]], totals 378,050 words.
=== 500K-749K Words ===
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* ''[[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.
* ''[http://agnph.com/fics/viewstory.php?sid=2995 Sabetha, The Walker of Fate]'', an ''extensive'' ''[[Pokémon]]'' fanfic weighting in at a little over 520,000 words and 77 chapters.
* ''[[Ultimate Sleepwalker|Ultimate Sleepwalker: The New Dreams]]'' comes in at 115 chapters and 663,325 words. [[
* ''[[Fallout Equestria]]''. A crossover between the ''Fallout'' and ''My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic'', is 45 chapters (plus epilogue) and approximately 600,000 words long, making it one of the longest, if not ''the'' longest ''[[My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic|MLP:FiM]]'' fanfiction.
* ''[[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.
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* ''[[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.
* ''[[Hermione Granger and the Boy Who Lived]]'', one of the keystone stories of [[The Teraverse]], clocks in at 660,498 words.
* ''[https://www.fanfiction.net/s/7180762/1/Contract-Labor Contract Labor]'', a still-in-progress ''[[Love Hina]]'' fic featuring a very-badass Keitaro, hit 501K words with chapter 75.
* The classic '90s ''[[Bubblegum Crisis]]'' fanfic ''[[The Bubblegum Zone]]'' is approximately 640,000 words in ten chapters.
=== 750K-999K Words ===
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* The ''Halo'' fanfiction ''[[The Life]]'' has around 1,600,000 words. It is the longest story in the Halo fanfiction.net archive.
* I don't know how many words ''[https://fiction.live/stories/Abyssal-Admiral-Quest-/QGSpwAtjf9NMtvsTA/Weeks-One-and-Two-Slow-and-FAST-/CofxdX3nQJERFo79f Abyssal Admiral Quest]'' (story is nsfw, no idea if the are nsfw images) is, but it is definitely over 1,000,000 words long. The website it is on estimates it taking 8 days to read.
* The ''[[Worm]]/[[Luna Varga]]'' crossover fic ''[[Taylor Varga]]'' clocks in at well over two million words as of the beginning of 2023, and isn't finished yet.
* ''[[The Secret Return of Alex Mack]]'', a [[Mega Crossover]] story revolving around a [[Continuation Fic|continuation]] of ''[[The Secret World of Alex Mack]]'' and the tale that kicked off [[The Teraverse]], is 1,177,157 words long.
== Literature ==
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** 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.
* Joked about in ''[[
* 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.
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** 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.
* ''[[Harry Potter]]'': if you stack all seven books one on top of another, they form a pile over 30 cm tall - kids' books! The amazing thing is that kids still read them regardless. Though only the fourth or fifth book onwards could be considered individual doorstoppers. [[Lampshaded]] in ''[[The Book of Bunny Suicides|Return of the Bunny Suicides]]'', where a bunny orders ''[[Harry Potter and
*** Lampshaded on the book jacket of ''[[Harry Potter and
{{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]].
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* ''[[Battlefield Earth]]''.
* ''[[Mission Earth]]'', a dekalogy<ref>"Dekalogy: A novel in ten volumes"</ref> by [[L. Ron Hubbard]], who also wrote ''[[Battlefield Earth]]''.
** More specifically, the hardcover pressing of the book's volumes add up to 3,992 pages. Folks, that's longer than all of ''[[The Lord of the Rings]]'' (1,178 pages) and ''[[Akira]]'' (2,182 pages) combined, with ''[[Harry Potter and
* ''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.]
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* The first two books in Orson Scott Card's ''[[Ender's Game]]'' series are under 400 pages, but the third book and the fourth book were originally one massive novel that would have been about 962 pages in paperback. Even with this division, the third book was still the longest in the main series at nearly 600 pages.
=== Encyclopedias and Dictionaries ===
* The 1951 edition of the Webster's New World Dictionary of the American Language (Encyclopedic Edition) which is roughly 25 cm long, 20 cm wide, and at ''least'' 10 cm '''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.
** This is a consequence of Oxford's policy of never removing a word (not even the ones that now require [[N-Word Privileges]] to use) from any version of the dictionary save for the Pocket edition. The 1934 edition of the ''Concise Oxford Dictionary'' fits in a shirt pocket, while the 2006 edition measures approximately 9.5"×6.5"×2.5" - this is the version that's marketed for casual home use. At least it still fits in a single volume.
* The Spanish Royal Academy dictionary is two tomes that amount to 3548 pages in font size 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.
** The full version is [http://www.amazon.com/Kanji-Dictionary-Mark-Spahn/dp/0804820589/ref=pd_sim_b_5 here]. Look at that list price!
* 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 totaling 3200 pages.
* The ''[[wikipedia:Merck Index|Merck Index]]'' is about 2198 pages.
* A version of the ''Encyclopedia Britannica'' published in the late 1870s is 25 volumes, with each one being eight to ten centimetres thick.
* 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, working 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 ''[[wikipedia:Physicians' Desk Reference|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 ([https://web.archive.org/web/20111229021438/http://www.tkshare.com/Image3/200932219283735977801.jpeg 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.
* The ''Meyers Konversationslexikon'': well over 30 volumes, 16 cm wide, 7 cm thick, 25 cm high, all around 1000 pages, 3 mm writing height in fracture, printed in 1906. It's an encyclopedia on about everything known back then along with facsimiles, maps, tables and other pictures.
* In 2009, somebody decided to print and bind part of the English [[Wikipedia]]. [http://weeklydrop.com/2009/06/wikipedia-book/ This] was the result, and that article uses an uncropped version of the image that this page does. (And this book contains only 2,500 articles, while the English Wikipedia had, as of December 2009, a thousand times more.
** As of the 13th of August 2020, Wikipedia totals [http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Size_in_volumes 3,661,616,631 words across 6,140,000 articles], which would require 2747 volumes to print.
* The unabridged edition of William Vollman's "calculus of violence" ''[https://web.archive.org/web/20110614130205/http://www.mcsweeneys.net/authorpages/vollmann/vollmann.html Rising Up and Rising Down]'' weighs in at 3,352 pages across seven volumes.
* The printed version of ''Chemical Abstracts'' filled whole bookshelves (the company tossed in the towel as of January 1, 2010 and is now only offering the publication electronically) considering the book provides overviews for over 50 million chemical substances, their invention, production, uses, patents, properties; the same for 60 million proteins and DNA sequences; along with a subsection devoted to summarising all major scholarly publications on chemistry from the past 103 years... and is all updated'' daily''.
** One of their sales agents managed to crash the CAS servers once with an demonstration. He explained how to do an complex search. And all ten people in the room pressed enter at the same time; cue general computational blackout at the CAS mainframe.
* The Yellow Pages are books that contain every single phone number in a given area, as well as plenty of advertising. They usually contain several hundred pages even in a more sparsely-populated area. Anybody who uses the Yellow Pages will most likely remember having crushed a toe with one. Recently shrunk to paperback size, with the same number of pages.
* The thirteenth edition of ''Svenska Akademiens ordlista'' (The Swedish Academy's Dictionary) has 1130 pages.
* Pokonry's ''Indogermanisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch'' (a huge [[w:Indo-European languages|Indo-European]] dictionary) clocks in at 1,648 pages, is often divided into 2 volumes... screw it, here's the [http://www.amazon.com/Indogermanisches-Etymologisches-Woerterbuch-Set-vols/dp/0828866023 Amazon link].
* The legendary ''Capital''. Three volumes of well over five hundred pages ''each'', about 2500 in total... and he was working on a ''[[Serial Escalation|fourth]]'' when he died.
* De Dikke Van Dale (the 'fat' Van Dale), the most well-known Dutch dictionary, is divided in three volumes and has a total of 4.464 pages.
=== Government ===
* 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.
** All legislation generated by the US government is unnaturally large. The recent health care reform bill was over 1900 pages. The depressing part is that if they ever stuck to what the bill is actually about, they'd probably manage to get it under 50 pages every time. (Generally, these bills get to be so enormous because they contain several dozen completely unrelated laws that senators insist must be incorporated as a condition of supporting the law.)
** [[Tom Clancy]]'s ''Executive Orders'' features someone using this to break a table to prove a point.
* 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.
** A multiple doorstop because there has/had to be a version of the text in every official language of the Union (23 at last count)
* Speaking of constitutions, the [[wikipedia:Constitution of Alabama|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, [[Mind Screw|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''.
* The ''Canada Flight Supplement'' is a civil/military publication by NavCanada. It contains about 800-900 pages detailing every single registered aerodrome and certified airport in Canada. It also contains some relatively easy access information about navigation laws, certain signals, and other procedures. It is considered a bible to many pilots. On cross-country trips or in unfamiliar areas, carrying a ''current'' CFS is mandatory, if not required by law. The kicker is that it's published every ''56 days'', with only marginally incremental changes occurring between editions. Imagine tens of thousands of these being printed every 56 days. Tree killer indeed.
** No wonder one of the key markets for e-book readers is the aviation sector.
* You can break a photocopier glass panel with one volume of the Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland, 1424-1707 in seven nineteenth century volumes, each two feet high.
* A lawyer decided to make a compilation of ALL the Brazil's tributary laws. The result is a monster of 43215 pages of 2.20m x 1.40m and the compilation weighs 6.2 ton.
* Most [[Forces With Firepower]] have Technical and Field Manuals that fit this trope. An [[Invoked Trope]] because the manual for a [[Cool Plane]] or other vehicle details maintenance, repair of damage and other topics. The same is true for field manuals, they cover your strategy and what the enemy's strategy may be. Most western militaries offer their TM's as digital copies because of the space and paper those manuals requite. However poor sods who had to carry those doorstoppers around now have to carry militarized laptops.
=== Magazines ===
* ''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.
* At the height of its popularity around 1994-1995, ''[[Electronic Gaming Monthly]]'' would crank out issues that totalled about 400+ pages in length (although half the pages were just ads.) This caused ''EGM2'', a spinoff magazine which focused more on tips and tricks launched in July 1994. For comparison's sake, the magazine could barely fill 100 pages by the time it "died" in early 2009.
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* ''[[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!).
=== Textbooks ===
* ''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.
* ''Any'' college textbook about computers is a Doorstopper. According to Amazon.com Deitel and Deitel's ''How to program in C/C++ and Java'' is 1,504 and 1,500 pages respectively. The C# version is 1600 pages.
* 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.
** ''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 ''Gr'''a'''y's'', not ''[[Grey's Anatomy|Grey's]]'') is apparently even longer...
*** ''Molecular Biology of the Cell, Third Edition'' by Alberts ''et al'' (degree-level biology textbooks aren't renowned for their title originality, it seems) clocks in at 1294 numbered pages, plus 64 pages of glossaries and indexes.<ref>The textbook (6th ed.) is now 1601 pages, not counting the indexes and glossaries</ref>
*** ''Biochemistry, Fifth Edition'' by Berg, Tymoczko and Stryer deserves an honourable mention for its 900+ numbered pages, not counting the glossary and preface (which contains no less than 6 versions of the contents), consisting almost entirely of waffle like "phosphorylase kinase phosphorylates phosphorylase", and being recommended to freshman biochemistry students.
*** ''Gray's Anatomy: 40th edition'' goes for 1576 pages
** ''Biology 2nd Edition'' by Knox, Ladiges, Evans and Saint.
** ''Biology, 8th Edition'' by Neil Campbell and Jane Reece, which is a definitive textbook of sorts, has 1393 numbered pages and is a pain to lug around. Humorously, a diagram explaining Western Blotting uses the textbook itself as an example of a heavy weight that would be needed for the process.
** 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.
** ''Table of Integrals, Series and Products'' by Gradshteyn and Rhyzik. Not so much of a textbook, but an excellent reference. Over 1200 pages of [[Exactly What It Says on the Tin|integration tables]]. Seems that one can buy it as a CD-ROM those days, but where's the beauty in that?
** ''Theoretical Physics'' by Lev Landau, Evgeny Lifshitz ''et al'' is (despite its several flaws) ''the'' definitive 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",<ref>There is an anecdote where Landau, having lost the 20-pages long draft of one particularly 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 a more serious note, the math level required from the reader of the more advanced chapters is ''extremely'' high.</ref> or its page count could've easily topped [[Over Nine Thousand|10000]] (it's 5581 pages 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.
** ''[[Richard Feynman|The Feynman Lectures on Physics]]''. Even split into three volumes (plus an additional fourth commentary volume) it's a hefty beast. Each book is over 12 inches tall and collectively they are three inches thick.
** The published output of Roger Penrose, the English physicist and mathematician, is notable in this regard. ''The Emperor's New Mind'' is 602 pages; ''Shadows of the Mind'', on broadly the same subject as ''TENM'' but written ''after he'd changed his opinion'', is a relatively lightweight 457 pages. These are popular science books and not textbooks! His ''chef-d'oeuvre'' though is the massive ''The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide To The Laws of the Universe'', straddling the middle ground between popular science and legitimate textbook, weighing in at a meaty 1094 pages.
** ''Physics for Scientists and Engineers'' by Jewett and Serway is required literature at some universities' Physics studies. First-year students thinking they were finally free from carrying around heavy bags full of bookwork like in high school generally end up disappointed.
* Law school casebooks are wonderfully heavy. For example, Cohen, Varat and Amar's ''Constitutional Law, Cases & Materials'', 13th Edition, weighs in at a hearty '''2076''' pages. And people think that the US Constitution is simple...
** And law school text books are as nothing when compared to practitioner handbooks. For example, the Butterworths (English) Company Law Handbook (24th edition 2010) weighs in at 3,733 pages in a single volume. There is also the, possibly apocryphal, story about a tax partner at one of the major City law firms who [[Throw the Book At Them|concussed a junior]] who was irritating him by speaking on the phone with a well aimed copy of Simon's Tax Intelligence.
* ''The Control Handbook'', a book on control theory/systems engineering, has '''1566''' pages (according to Amazon). Now THAT's a handbook!
** For that record, many engineering books. Go to the library of any nearby university and see it for yourself.
* ''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''! Knuth 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 ([[Crazy Prepared|though, he has sketched out what he hasn't covered yet]]).
** Covers of the third edition of Volume 1 quote Bill Gates as saying, "If you think you're a really good programmer . . . read (Knuth's) Art of Computer Programming... You should definitely send me a resume if you can read the whole thing." (a quote from [[The Other Wiki]]). Lore has it that Steve Jobs [[Badass Boast|claimed to have done just this]] in 1983 when Knuth was invited to give a lecture to the Mac team; Knuth's response was something like "I seriously doubt that."
* 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 20th edition, and weighing in at 1104 pages. Not quite a textbook, but a damn fine reference. The 18th edition was even bigger at 1584 pages.
** The DVD including video and back editions. Someone, somewhere, is going to need a Baby AT system fixed. And looking up some details of the [[Cosmic Horror|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 [[American Customary Measurements|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.
* ''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.
* 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 approximately 9" by 11". It has been described by friends as "Epic."
* 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 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 3 cm thick takes up around 300-400KB). For something really complex, such as Linux, you're looking at several ''hundred'' megabytes for the source code.
** 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.
*** And, indeed. Linux kernel 2.6.34 (the latest{{when}} version as of June 2, 2010) is a 64MB compressed file which expands to a 435MB source tree.
* 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.
* Alfred Whitehead and Bernard Russell set out in their ''[[Principia Mathematica]]'' to reinvent the entirety of mathematics from the most basic theorems and first principles. 4 years, 3 volumes, 2000+ pages of the densest symbolic logic notation ever put to paper, and a revised edition later, the authors ended the project prematurely due to "mental exhaustion".
** 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]].
* Chemistry textbooks in general. The "Bible" of inorganic chemistry in German from Holleman + Wieberg is ~1500 pages in ten-point text with even smaller footnotes, that are sometimes over half a page long. Impossible to hold and read.
* 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.
* The 1941 Edition ''Machinist's and Tool Maker's Handy Book'' runs to about 1700 pages, including a 350 page primer on mathematics (from basic arithmetic to moderately-advanced calculus), physics, and engineering design principles. It's technical school in a book, and a thorough one to boot.
* While not traditionally used as a textbook, ''America'' by Tindal and Shi (the sixth edition) is a narrative history of America that starts at the landing of the first colonists and continues until the beginning of Bush's presidency and the Second Gulf War. Excluding index, glossary, etc., the book clocks in at over 1500 pages.
* The ''[http://www.ece.udel.edu/~mills/gallery/pic/ibm67d.jpg Systems Reference Library]'' for the IBM 67 mainframe is taller than it is wide. (From [http://www.ece.udel.edu/~mills/gallery/gallery8.html here])
* When Boeing entered the 747 into the competition for Heavy Logistics System (better known as the C-5 Galaxy), they provided ''150 cardboard boxes full of documentation''. The engineering summary alone was thicker than a New York City phone book. And they didn't even win.
* [[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.
* Will Durant's series, ''[[The Story of Civilization]]''. 11 books, each of them a doorstopper in their own right, with a couple of them being more than 1000 pages. The series as a whole is 10 000 pages, and ''four million words''. Durant wanted to cover up to the early 20th century, but he and his wife were only able to finish up to the Age of Napoleon.
== Manga ==
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* EN World's ''[[War of the Burning Sky]]'' campaign path (Edition 3.5) is 708 pages and is heavy enough to use as a weapon.
* ''[[The Dark Eye]]'' in the newest{{when}} 4.1 edition has several books for the rules, 4 to be precise with each over 300 pages. That's just the rules, admittedly with much of the setting in them. Stuff like bestiary, spells, rituals, weapons and armor have 4 other books with each over 300 pages. The sourcebooks for the setting (all the regions on the continent, with geography, cultures, religions, races, food, clothing, ...) have at least 250 pages, each of the 13. Then there are some others, for things like gamemastering, dungeons, oceans, organisations, buildings, trade, city life and so on, 8 more books with at least 250 pages. Add to that the 186 "normal" adventures, the 50 or so other adventures (beginners, promotion and such), over 150 issues of the periodical since 1985, the other continent with around 9 books for rules and setting, 13 adventures, the 136 novels and the new continent they'll be releasing in the future.
== Toys ==
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* In an in-universe example, Lezard Valeth of ''[[Valkyrie Profile]]'' refers to the Philosopher's Stone as "a ten billion page codex". That is a pretty massive book.
=== Visual Novels ===
* 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.
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* ''[[The Half World]]'' MSTs were counted to be at ca. 200,000 words only after one year, which means it's updating faster than ''Homestuck''.
* The mother of all examples is ''[https://web.archive.org/web/20111122231558/http://www.fictionpress.com/s/2581873/1/Koukon_Bridge Koukon Bridge]'', which would have been completely ordinary [[Web Serial Novel|FictionPress]] material were it not the fact that it's nearly ''two million words long'' as still unfinished. At the rate it's going, it could very well break the record for longest continuous novel.
* The [[Reincarnation Fantasy|Isekai]] web novel ''[[Tori Transmigrated]]'' by "Aila Aurie" clocks in at 1,407,968 words in 238 chapters. Royalroad.com's automated statistics calculate that it would fill up 5,119 paperback-sized pages.
== Western Animation ==
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