Doorstopper: Difference between revisions

 

 

 

 

 

 

Can and will cause massive muscle fatigue when reading while holding the book in your hands. Can also cause the text to disappear into the center fold or the book to rip apart halfway through reading.

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

 

 

== [[Comic Books]] ==

* Return of Superman, it doesn't help that the book contains all 21 issues of the arc. Paired with [[The Death of Superman]] and World without a Superman, another 7 and 9 issues respectively, is thicker than a phone book.

** The collected volumes for ''Superman: Doomsday'' and ''Superman: Our Worlds at War'' are of comparable length.

* 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.

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

* 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 ''KISS Kompendium'', a compilation of the [[Kiss]] Psycho Circus comic book series which comes in at a massive 1280 pages and 10+ pounds.

* 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.

 

 

 

 

** ''[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.

 

== Literature ==

* ''[[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.

** ''[[Anathem]]'' is a thousand pages long, complete with a glossary, 3 appendices, and, in the promo copy sent to reviewers and book stores, honest to god [[Feelies]].

** ''[[Cryptonomicon]]'' by Neal Stephenson. The fact that it's printed in a small typeface is a telling indication that you should be grateful that it's ''only'' 918 pages long. Some printings break the four-digit mark, coming in at 1054 pages. Latin America, thankfully, saw it released as three separate tomes.

*** You ''can'' see the handwritten manuscript on display at the Science Fiction Museum in [[Seattle]]. It really is that big.

*** Somewhat [[Lampshade Hanging|Lampshaded]] in ''[[The Baroque Cycle]]'' where one character mentions using the in-universe ''[[Cryptonomicon]]'' (a text on cryptography) to hold a door open.

** Before his death, Jordan promised the twelfth book would be the final in the series if his publishers had to invent a new method of binding and sell the book with its own library cart. After reviewing the notes Jordan left for the book, [[Brandon Sanderson]]'s first act as the co-author of the final book was to split it into 3 books. The first of these was 766 pages, the second was 843 and the third can be expected to be equally weighty.

** In fact, it weighs in at exactly 1001, a number which has relevance to the plot. His next work (discounting finishing the Wheel of Time) had a proposed title of The Book of Infinite Pages, which is now being reconsidered after the editor thought that would be to easy to mock.

** In the Czech Republic, every single book is split into two.

** In France, ''A Storm of Swords'' is split in four volumes and the other books in two or three.

** 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.

** 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.

** ''To Green Angel Tower'' was so big, it had to be split into two parts when printed as a mass-market paperback.

** The ''[[Otherland]]'' series of which there are four volumes.

** One edition of ''[[The Brothers Karamazov]]'' is 720 pages long.

** ''Penguin Classics's'' edition of the Brothers K is (with around 12 pages of notes at the end) 1,013 pages long due to its more detailed, faithful translation.

** This is the subject of a joke from the [[White Wolf|Black Dog Games Factory]] game ''[[Human Occupied Landfill]]''. The Dickens Boys (killer librarians) wear "''War and Peace'' armour" because "nothing can get through ''War and Peace''".

* Konstantin Simonov's ''The Living and The Dead'' and Mikhail Sholokhov's ''Quiet Don'' are even more doorstopperrific.

* ''[[The Gulag Archipelago]]'' (by [[Alexandr Solzhenitsyn]]), on the other hand, clocks in at 1,930 pages split across three volumes, the latter two of which appear to be out of print, while the first volume and an abridged one-volume edition remain in print. (Has this happened for any other books?)

* [[Terry Goodkind]]'s ''[[Sword of Truth]]'' series. Eleven of the buggers, though the last three are a lot shorter than the others. The second one takes the cake; it can clock in at just shy of 1,000 pages, and some editions go well over.

** In Holland, a woman pressed charges against a mail company because a copy of King's ''IT'' '''killed her chihuahua ''' when it dropped through the mail chute. The hardcover copy of ''[[IT]]'' is 1,135 pages long.

** ''[[Under the Dome]]'' is a Doorstopper.

** ''[[The Tommyknockers|Tommyknockers]]'', ''Tommyknockers'' fell on the floor. Made a hole where there wasn't one before.

** ''Insomnia'' could practically serve as a cure for that particular malady, being thick enough to knock the sufferer unconscious.

** However, it's only a Doorstopper when it's kept in verse. A prose edition is about 370 pages.

* ''A Suitable Boy''

* ''[[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.]

*** Hamilton seems incapable of finishing his books properly (good books tho'). His only "ends" are the ends of series. Only 'The Evolutionary Void' seems to avoid this.

* All four books in Christopher Paolini's ''[[The Inheritance Cycle|Inheritance]]'' series, with the final book, ''[[Title Drop|Inheritance]]'', reaching the upper extremes of the 800 page-range. This was after it was broken off from its first half, ''Brisingr'', which was over 700 pages long. Stitching them back together results in the true "[[Fan Nickname|Book Three]]" of the "''[[Artifact Title|Inheritance Trilogy]]''" being 1500 pages long.

* Four of the six books of James Clavell's "[[Asian Saga]]" are over 1000 pages long, including ''[[Shogun]]''. The other two (as it happens, the first two to be written) are over 500.

* ''[[Infinite Jest]]'' by [[David Foster Wallace]]. 1,079 pages, including 96 pages of [[Footnote Fever|footnotes]].

** And woe betide you if you skip the footnotes; important plot points occur there, so if you don't read them and read them carefully, you'll be hopelessly lost.

** Pynchon's later novels ''Mason & Dixon'' and ''Against the Day'' are 784 and 1104 pages, respectively.

** His first, ''V.'', is a bit more concise at 533 pages.

** In one section, Hugo describes, in lavish detail (well, lavish might not fit) a crack in the wall, through which a character looks. This description takes up at least a page and a half. In the ''[[Author Filibuster|condensed]] [[Padding|version]]''

** The unabridged version contains a 50-page essay on the battle of Waterloo. The reveal that is important to the plot appears on the last page.

* Anything by James A. Michener, notably ''Centennial.'' Twelve hundred pages. Mr. Michener's writing is entertaining, but it's true that his later books should be under the by-line [[Shown Their Work|"James Michener and his Research Team".]]

** His books also tend to span a large number of characters and/or time periods, so there are some nicely isolated sections, even if you lose some of the recurring themes from doing so. You might not be able to take a small part out of ''Space'' too easily, but some chapters of ''The Source'' can be taken out to (say) get a class full of high school students to get a feel for David's Israel and just how much sleuth work archaeologists have done on it.

** 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.]

* 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.

** ...on the second printing. The first printing that was in one single book fairly quickly split itself into two volumes.

* Eiji Yoshikawa's ''Musashi'', a fictionalized version of the life of [[Miyamoto Musashi]], is over 900 pages, typically printed on unusually thin paper. It was originally a multi-year newspaper serial.

** The Black Library also has Warhammer Fantasy fiction and has several omnibuses there too, among others is ''Gotrek and Felix'', and ''Malus Darkblade''.

* The ''[[Dragonlance]] Trilogy'' has been combined into a single doorstopper. ''The Annotated Dragonlance'' is even ''worse'' because of all the, y'know, [[Footnote Fever|annotations and stuff]].

* 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''.

* 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.

** And that's ''abridged'' versions! ''War of Honor'', ticking at 800+ pages as it is, had the whole subplot about Esther McQueen's rebellion cut out from the draft. It was later published as a separate novella.

** [[It Got Worse]] - the series has split into three branches now, each one dealing with various sub plots happening at roughly the same time. Each one a doorstopper in its own right, and the only way to know everything is to read them all.

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

** Also by Joyce, ''[[Finnegans Wake]]'' - not as long (628 pages), but [[True Art Is Incomprehensible|just as difficult to read]].

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

* 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!

* Any Norton Anthology of... well, of anything. The print is microscopic, and yet they could still be used as bludgeons. ''The Norton Anthology of English Literature'' (Volume 1) in paperback runs to 2518 pages of thin paper, not counting indexes and appendices.

* Most of Melanie Rawn's works. She just doesn't do less than 800 pages in paperback with 8 point type, which just might be why you've never heard of her. Both ''Dragon Prince'' and ''Dragon Star'' are triliogies of incredible length, with a frustrating number of similarly-named characters. Not works for the faint of heart, or sound of mind.

* Many classic Chinese novels are in the 2000-page range, though most editions are split into volumes:

* Vikram Chandra's very good crime thriller epic ''Sacred Games'' is the novel equivalent of a Bollywood movie. (Over 1080 pages.)

* Most of Wayne Johnston's novels are doorstoppers - ''The Colony of Unrequited Dreams'' is over 600 pages... in trade paperback, and they look much longer than that in hardcover. And they are very heavy to lift.

* The Great ''[[Book of Amber]]'', by [[Roger Zelazny]], is actually ten fairly small books making up the entirety of the Amber series. However, unless you're prepared to search, this is the only version actually available and has been the only one in print for years. Clocks in at somewhere around 1200 pages if I'm not mistaken.

* If you'd print out the web-published [[Alternate History]] ''[[Decades of Darkness]]'', you'd need more than 1800 sheets of paper (using an average-sized font and paper).

* ''[[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.''

* ''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]].

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

* ''[[The Bonfire of the Vanities]]'' at just over 700 pages usually, and another example here that was originally published serially (though it was revised for its release as a novel).

* [[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.

** [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.

* Judy Jones and William Wilson's ''An Incomplete Education'' contains 638 pages worth of everything you need to know to fake being "well-rounded."

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

* ''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.

 

 

* 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.

*** ''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, 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.

** 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.

* 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.

* 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 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.

* 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 ==

** ''Morrowind'' itself features over 1500 pages of text in its [[In-Game Novel|readable books]]. Arguably also applies to ''Oblivion'' and ''Skyrim'', which recycled most of this material while adding a (comparatively) small amount.

*** Someone printed all the books found in Oblivion and [http://i.imgur.com/ce1dE.jpg bound them all in a single Doorstopper]

* 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.

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

* 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.

 

 

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

*** 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.

 

== Web Original ==

 

== Western Animation ==

 

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