Longest Book Ever Written: Controversy behind the Guinness World Record Decision

By: Isaac Brown

Illustrated by: Carla Cieza Espinoza

If you search “longest book in the world,” you will probably see Marcel Proust’s immense eight-part novel, “Remembrance of Things Past,” weighing in at approximately 1.5 million words. This novel holds the Guinness World Record and yet some would say that it is not nearly the longest book ever written.

Much of the controversy revolves around the question of what can be considered a book. So, here are some candidates to take the place of Proust’s novel, and the reasons for and against their crowning.

“The Loud House: Revamped” is perhaps the longest text that could be considered a book. With a supposed 14 million words (and growing), it seems to include many of the elements that would be found in a novel. This massive chronicle, however, is a fanfiction and cannot be published. Not only is it not a book in a legal sense, but the premises of the book are not the author’s intellectual property. Nonetheless, rejecting this candidate is objectionable: why should legal code have a say over what a book is? Is it only art if it’s legal? That said, the work’s legal status is grounds for the Guinness World Record to reject this option.

Next up is the “Blah Story” by Nigel Tomm at some 11 million words. This piece is perhaps the most controversial and most ridiculed on this list because the entire book (twenty-three volumes of it) are mostly randomly generated words with literally millions of instances of the word “blah” inserted among them. This includes a randomly generated word that is millions of characters long. Many would reject this candidate not so much on the grounds that it is not a book, but on the grounds that it is not even art, because it was produced more by an algorithm than it was with human creativity. Nonetheless, one could also argue that Tomm’s creativity was a necessary catalyst for the book to be generated. Still, you could see why it’d be annoying if you were, say, Marcel Proust, and all your hard work got dethroned by someone using a random word generator. It is legally considered a book, but seems to carry less status as a “book” than any fanfiction.

Next up is Mark Leach’s several-million word work, “Marienbad My Love.” This one, though longer than Proust’s novel, faces some major issues. Foremost is that not all of the content is written by Leach. Much of it is a compilation of pre-existing texts. Perhaps one could say that he made the entire piece because he organized the content. However, if this is the case, then any anthology could be a book, in which case whoever could put the greatest number of novels into a single text would have created the longest book. This is not to mention that, like Nigel Tomm’s text, Leach’s is a collection of several volumes, each of which may be considered a book by itself. So, in a sense, the length of a book is arbitrary: that is, someone could push a series together and say it’s one book (essentially what Tolkien did with the “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy).

While we’ve been dealing with books from the last century so far (in fact, mostly from the last couple decades), this next one comes from as early as 3000 BC: the Hindu epic the “Mahabarata.” When translated this comes in at nearly two million words long. But of course, it comes with its issues. First, “Mahabarata” is written in a different form than the other books―namely, epic poetry. This may not be much of an issue for the record book, but it raises the question of whether it should be considered within a different category. That is, is a single poem a book? It also faces the same issues some of the other books have faced, such as authorship, as we have no knowledge of a single writer, but only an era of several centuries during which the tradition was gradually compiled.

There are some other options, such as Madeleine de Scudery’s “Artamene,” but this also faces the issue of publication. It was unpublished during its time, due to its immense size of over two million words. Nonetheless, it is published now and even available on Amazon.

Jules Romains’ “Men of Good Will” is a similar example: though it is a published multi-volume work of about two million words (only slightly shorter than “Artamene”), it is not considered the longest novel. This seems to be because of its several volumes. Yet, Proust’s novel has eight parts. So, if he had called them volumes, would his work still have been chosen?

Regardless, for the record of longest book, my money is on “Artamene,” as it checks all the legal, creative, and authorial boxes. The only holdup seems to be that it was not published in its day. This is a testament to its high word-count, as it was only unpublished due to its exorbitant length. Perhaps the Guinness World Record should expand its definition for what makes a book.