Textbooks / Doorstopper

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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 & Deitel's How to program in C/C++ and Java is 1,504 and 1,500 pages respectively. The C# version is 1600 pages.
- So true. The "Cormen" calls itself an introduction to algorithms and has 1000 and some pages. Any more than an introduction, and it would be NP-complete.
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.^note
Oracle PL/SQL Programming is 1,391 pages long.
Mac OS X Internals: A Systems Approach contains 1,680 pages.
The Microsoft Visual C++ 6.0 Reference Library has over 5,000 pages across five volumes.
The Microsoft Visual C++ MFC Library Reference has 2,200 pages.
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 Gray's, not 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 ^note.
  - 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 integration tables. Seems that one can buy it as a CD-ROM those days, but where's the beauty in that?
- There must be tons of books like these which became obsolete by the computer - The 3j and 6j symbols is a random example currently dangerously bending the shelf of this troper (498 pages, but laaarge format). His FORTRAN program does the same in 100 code lines. Buy any symbolic algebra package, and chances are good it's an inbuilt function.
- 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"^note, or its page count could've easily topped 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.
- 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.
- In chemistry/engineering, the CRC handbooks. Or the Beilstein. Or the Gmelin. God bless interactive DVDs.
- Taking the cake in pure mathematics is the popular A Comprehensive Introduction to Differential Geometry, by Michael Spivak. How comprehensive is it? Well, the text comprises five volumes and no fewer than 2300 pages, if that's any indication.^note
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 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. Currently available in three of a planned seven volumes, and each one is a doorstopper unto itself. The fourth volume has even been broken into individual volumes, and part of its content is available now via "fascicles". The complete set taken decades to finish for various reasons, so it would be nothing short of a miracle if Knuth lived to finish it (though he has sketched out what he hasn't covered yet).
- Would you believe he actually wrote a complete version of it once upon a time? He originally thought it would be one book with twelve chapters, but the chapters have since been divided across seven volumes. He actually wrote a rough draft of the one-volume version by hand; this handwritten copy was 3,000 pages long.
- 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 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."
- One of the numerous projects that has delayed the volumes later than 3 is the TeX typesetting system and documentation (about 1978 to 1989). The documentation by Knuth runs to five volumes and 2598 pages (and can be purchased in a slipcase if you wish). This isn't quite as bad as it sounds. Only two volumes (and 844 pages) are the documentation itself. Two more volumes (and 1166 pages) are the sourcecode for the system provided by Knuth (without the gigabytes of extensions and macros that have been developed since). The final volume (588 pages) is the formal definitions of approximately 500 character glyphs (the actual symbols used to print things) in the system's internal character description system. (Note that he's taking more than one page, on average, to describe each character.)
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. Also 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, though the only one you might be able to finish on a plane ride is the Groundwork.
Scott Mueller's Upgrading and Repairing PCs, currently in its 22nd 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 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 twelve pounds.
- This art historian found Gardner's History of Art 9th Edition to be a particularly useful device for perfectly flattening drawings.
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 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 aprox. 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 3cm 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 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.^note
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 Bertrand 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 proved that it was impossible for their work to be both consistent and complete.
Chemistry textbooks in general. The "Bible" of inorganic chemistry in Germany is from Holleman + Wieberg is ~1500 pages in 10pt 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.
- Lutz has also written Learning Python, which is 1,648 pages long.
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 Systems Reference Library◊ for the IBM 67 mainframe is taller than it is wide. (From here.)
When Boeing entered the 747^note 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 phonebook. And they didn't even win.
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 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 10000 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.
A complete index for the Dewey decimal library classification system takes up four thick volumes in its unabridged edition. Then again, it tells you how to symbolize every single little thing that human beings could possibly write about.
Another "not technically a textbook": Windows 8 All-in-one for Dummies clocks in at not much under 1100 pages. Measuring 9.5 inches high, 7.5 inches wide, and 2 inches thick, it weighs 4 pounds. Considering Windows 8 is frequently found on tablet and laptop computers, the guide for the operating system often outweighs the devices the operating system is used on.^note
Guía del Firmamento by José Luis Comellas. Not a textbook per se, but practically a Bible to observe the sky for amateur astronomers that clocks at 776 pages and includes a long appendix listing all the deep-sky objects, that (supposedly) can be seen from just the Northern Hemisphere^note with a 3-inch telescope^note. The earliest editions not only had hardcovers but also were printed with a larger paper size, and could crush a small dog if thrown from high enough.
Fundamentals of Physics by Halliday, Resnick and Walker. The extended edition runs to 1448 pages, but what makes this even more doorstopper-y is the fact that the page area is larger than an A4 sheet. The book's total weight is close to 3kg (6.72 lbs).
The entirety of Intel's software developer manual for its IA-32 and x86_64 architectures comprises 5,052 pages.
Although not traditionally used as a textbook, Stephen Jay Gould's «The Structure of Evolutionary Theory» (ISBN 9780674006133) is the culmination of more than 20 years of work. It's also 1400 pages long.
The full text of the core specification for The Unicode Standard is available as either a 1,000+ page PDF or a set of two paperback volumes (and each new version makes the thing longer still)... and the full standard also includes fourteen additional Standard Annexes (published separately). In return, you get detailed descriptions of the hundreds of scripts encoded in Unicode, plus hundreds more pages of detail on the structure of Unicode itself, its character encoding schemes, conformance requirements, implementation guidelines, et cetera.
- Oh, and woe betide anyone who tries to download all of the Unicode code charts (containing notes, character names and codepoints, and reference glyphs for every single one of the over 149,000 characters encoded in Unicode so far), as the full set would come to considerably greater than the length of the standard itself (with the vast majority of that being endless lists of Han ideographs).
Pretty much any edition of Paul Bolstad's GIS Fundamentals: A First Text on Geographic Information Systems qualifies. The 6th Edition clocks in at 764 pages.

Doorstopper / Textbooks

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