Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic vs The Book-Hunter
Both counted from their full texts, the same way, on the same day.
1,085words between them — 4 min of it
Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic is longer — 133,201 words against 132,116 for The Book-Hunter, a difference of 1,085 words or about 4 min of extra reading. The Book-Hunter is the harder read, at grade 15 against 10.7.
SOURCE·Project Gutenberg full texts·both editions counted the same way·REVIEWED JUL 2026
Side by side
| Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic | The Book-Hunter | |
|---|---|---|
| Author | Weaver, Raymond M. (Raymond Melbourne) | Burton, John Hill |
| Words | 133,201 | 132,116 |
| Reading time at 250 wpm | 8h 53m | 8h 48m |
| Unique words | 15,726 | 15,532 |
| Sentences | 6,109 | 4,081 |
| Average sentence length | 21.8 words | 32.4 words |
| Reading grade | 10.7 | 15 |
| Reading ease | 57.2 | 44.9 |
| Long words | 12.9% | 13.9% |
Highlighted cells are the larger figure — except reading ease, where higher means easier.
SOURCE·Project Gutenberg full texts·both editions, same counting rule·REVIEWED JUL 2026
How this is worked out
- Both texts are counted the same way, from the same source, with Gutenberg's header and licence footer struck first.
- The gap is stated in words and then in time at 250 words a minute — the rate is printed because a duration without one cannot be checked.
- Difficulty is compared on Flesch–Kincaid grade, which reads sentence and word length only. It cannot see irony or dialect, so treat it as a measure of surface, not of effort.
gap = |133,201 − 132,116| = 1,085 words 1,085 ÷ 250 wpm = 4 min of extra reading
The second question
Which is longer, Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic or The Book-Hunter?
Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic is longer — 133,201 words against 132,116 for The Book-Hunter, a difference of 1,085 words or about 4 min of extra reading. The Book-Hunter is the harder read, at grade 15 against 10.7.
Colophon
Both figures computed from Project Gutenberg plain-text editions — ebook no. 50461 and no. 22136 — and from no other source. Neither book’s text is set on this site.
SOURCE·Project Gutenberg full texts·US public domain·REVIEWED JUL 2026
Word counts and reading levels are computed from a specific public-domain edition and will differ from other editions and from other counting methods — see the method page.
