"To make a book"

Please, I need some help with the following text:

- The lion was large as hell
- Big enough to make the book?
- Bigger than anything in the book.

In this conversation I do not understand two things.
1. What is “to make a book”? – to be big enough as to became a subject of a book (legend, tale)? Or something else?
2. Why in the first case is “large” used, and then “big”? Does it make any difference here?
Thanks beforehand.

To "make the book" means to make it into the record book ("make it" also means to achieve, to be included, etc.)

Large and big are interchangeable synonyms.

Uriel,

Thank you.

"Making a book" can also mean taking bets and recording them in a ledger (which is the book) : hence the term "bookmaker" or "bookie" for short.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematics_of_bookmaking