  We investigated long range correlations in two literary texts, Moby Dick by
H. Melville and Grimm's tales. The analysis is based on the calculation of
entropy like quantities as the mutual information for pairs of letters and the
entropy, the mean uncertainty, per letter. We further estimate the number of
different subwords of a given length n. Filtering out the contributions due to
the effects of the finite length of the texts, we find correlations ranging to
a few hundred letters. Scaling laws for the mutual information (decay with a
power law), for the entropy per letter (decay with the inverse square root of
n) and for the word numbers (stretched exponential growth with n and with a
power law of the text length) were found.
