Free Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Attack of the Factoids by Bathroom Readers’ Institute

Calculated to Drive You Mad did regularly.
    There was a loophole, however: the CCA covered only “comic books.” So Tales Calculated to Drive You Mad decided on a makeover and MAD “magazine” was born.
    MAD FACTS
    â€¢    In 1961 MAD made copyright history when music publishers—representing all-star songwriters like Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers, and Irving Berlin—sued the magazine. The issue? A songbook of parodies that included words with the instruction that they could be “sung to the tune of” a specific song. The musicians’ claim that only the original authors could legally parody their own songs was dismissed by judges all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court.
    â€¢    The magazine’s peak circulation was 2,132,644. This occurred in 1974, despite intense competition from a (slightly) more grownup satirical magazine, the National Lampoon .
    â€¢    The magazine’s mascot—the round-headed boy with an idiotic grin—went unnamed until a staff member noticed the name of Alfred Newman in the credits of a movie. That Newman wasa well-regarded film composer (and, incidentally, the uncle of composer Randy Newman). Hoping to forestall a lawsuit, the staff changed the spelling of Alfred’s last name and added E as a middle initial.
    â€¢    485 MADison Avenue was MAD ’s headquarters for decades. But in the magazine’s heyday, one envelope that contained a picture of Alfred E. Neuman was successfully delivered to the right address.
    â€¢    Between 1955 and 2001, MAD ran no real ads. They ran plenty of parody ads, though, viciously mocking nearly every product you could name.
    â€¢    MAD inspired so many imitators that founder/publisher Bill Gaines had a voodoo doll for each competitor labeled with a pin that was removed only when the imitator stopped publishing. Some of mostly short-lived imitators included Cracked, Sick, Nuts!, Crazy, Whack, Riot, Flip , and Madhouse . By the time of Gaines’s death in 1992, only one pin remained, representing Cracked , founded in 1958. It stopped publishing in 2007, but still exists as a popular Web site.
    â€¢    Artist Sergio Aragones has contributed more than 12,000 wordless gags running in the margins and other blank spaces of the magazine. Once called “the world’s fastest cartoonist,” Aragones’s art has appeared in every issue since 1963, except one in 1964 when his drawings were lost in the mail.
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    THAT’S A LOT OF BOOKS!
    The Library of Congress is the largest library in the world. It has more than 638 miles of shelf space to hold its 155 million items. It holds 35 million books and other print materials, 68 million manuscripts, 6.5 million pieces of sheet music, 3.4 million recordings, 13.6 million photographs, 5.4 million maps, and 100,000 comic books. Only about half of the Library of Congress’s collection is in English. The rest includes materials in 470 languages.

The Writer’s Desk
    Mark Twain was the first author to submit a typewritten manuscript to a publisher. The book was Life on the Mississippi in 1883. Twain, who loved new gadgets, was also one of the first owners of a typewriter.
    During the 33 years that author Anthony Trollope worked for the British post office, he wrote several novels by rising early and writing 1,000 words before work. Within postal circles, he’s best known as the guy who invented the street-corner mailbox.
    In all of his writings, Shakespeare mentioned the Americas only once, in The Comedy of Errors .
    Before becoming a world-famous author, Kurt Vonnegut wrote press releases for General Electric.
    Author Alissa Rosenbaum is better known as Ayn Rand.
    Children’s author Margaret Wise Brown—who wrote Goodnight Moon, The Runaway Bunny , and The Bunny’s Birthday —loved to hunt rabbits. She collected their feet as trophies.
    First-published authors