117 Fun Facts About Library

Which Roman general's fire, set among ships in Alexandria's harbour in 48 BC, is said to have spread to its great Library?

Julius Caesar, besieged in Alexandria, burned the ships in the harbour, and Plutarch says the blaze destroyed the great Library; yet scholars kept working there long after, so the loss was partial at most.

In the Dewey Decimal system, which subject occupies the 800s?

Literature fills the 800s, but unevenly: 810 to 889 go to American and European writing, while the literatures of every other language are squeezed into the 890s.

The Library of Alexandria formed part of which larger institution of scholars?

Mouseion scholars were paid by the Ptolemies and ate together in a common dining hall; the name, a shrine to the Muses, gave us the word 'museum'.

Whose 6,487 books did the US buy in 1815 for $23,950 to restock its national library after the Capitol burned?

Thomas Jefferson was paid $23,950 for the 6,487 volumes that restarted the library, but a second fire, on Christmas Eve 1851, destroyed nearly two-thirds of them.

Which future lawman took his first job at 18 as a messenger in the Library of Congress?

J. Edgar Hoover worked there while earning his law degree at night school; he later said the job trained him in the value of collating material, the habit behind the FBI's vast files.

Who became the first woman and the first African American Librarian of Congress in 2016?

Carla Hayden had run Baltimore's public libraries, and won praise in 2015 for keeping them open through the city's unrest; President Trump dismissed her from the post in May 2025.

Sir Thomas Bodley refounded the main research library of which university in 1602?

Oxford's library reopened in 1602 as the Bodleian, and readers are still admitted only after promising not to mark or remove a book, nor to 'kindle therein any fire or flame'.

Duke Humfrey's, the Bodleian's oldest reading room, stood in for which fictional location?

The Hogwarts library in three Harry Potter films is Duke Humfrey's, a room stripped of every book in 1550 by reformers purging Catholic texts and left empty until Thomas Bodley refilled it.

Which illuminated gospel manuscript is the most famous treasure of Trinity College Dublin's Old Library?

Book of Kells: stolen from its abbey church in 1007 for its jewelled gold cover, it was found months later under a sod, coverless, and reached Trinity College in 1661.

Trinity College Dublin's Long Room bears a striking resemblance to an archive seen in which film franchise?

Star Wars: Attack of the Clones gave its Jedi Archives the same barrel vault, double-height stacks and rows of busts; Lucasfilm denied copying, and the college decided not to take legal action.

Which pope, builder of the Sistine Chapel, formally founded the Vatican Library by papal bull in 1475?

Sixtus IV finished what Nicholas V began: Nicholas gathered the books and planned a public library but died before carrying it out, and the pope who gave the Sistine Chapel its name issued the bull in 1475.

Which New York mayor nicknamed the NYPL's marble lions Patience and Fortitude in the 1930s?

Fiorello La Guardia, mayor from 1934 to 1945, named the lions Patience and Fortitude for the qualities he felt New Yorkers needed to survive the Great Depression; Patience sits to the south, Fortitude to the north.

Before the 1930s, what were the NYPL lions' original names, honouring two of the library's founders?

Leo Astor and Leo Lenox honoured John Jacob Astor and James Lenox, whose private libraries were merged with Samuel Tilden's bequest in 1895 to create the city's public library.

Which 1984 hit opens with a librarian fleeing in terror from the basement stacks of the New York Public Library?

Ghostbusters filmed in the library's real reading room, but only in the early morning: the crew had to be out by 10 am, before the readers came in.

The Royal Library of Ashurbanipal, over 30,000 clay tablets, was found at which ancient Assyrian capital?

Nineveh fell to its enemies in 612 BC, and the fire that destroyed the palace is believed to have baked the library's clay tablets hard, helping them survive for Layard to dig up in 1849.

Which famous ancient poem was among the holdings of Ashurbanipal's 7th-century BC library?

Epic of Gilgamesh tablets from the library lay unread until 1872, when George Smith, a self-taught former banknote engraver, deciphered a flood story so like Noah's that it caused a sensation.

About how many libraries did Andrew Carnegie's money build worldwide between 1883 and 1929?

2,500 is the round figure for 2,509 in all. Carnegie paid only for the building, so each town had to supply the site and pledge yearly taxes worth a tenth of his gift to run it.

Andrew Carnegie's first public library opened in 1883 in his birthplace, in which country?

Scotland's Dunfermline was Carnegie's birthplace: the son of a handloom weaver, he left for America with his family in 1848 and gave his home town his first library in 1883.

Which pioneering subscription institution, America's first of its kind, did Franklin and his Junto found in 1731?

The Library Company began when Franklin's Junto, a club with few books of its own, pooled members' money to buy a shared collection for settling points raised in their debates.

Which US president borrowed The Law of Nations from the New York Society Library in 1789 and never returned it?

George Washington took out Vattel's The Law of Nations on 5 October 1789 and neither returned it nor paid a fine; in 2010 Mount Vernon gave the library another copy of the same edition.

The most overdue library book, returned after 288 years, was borrowed by which prime minister's father?

Robert Walpole's father, a colonel of the same name, borrowed a German book from Sidney Sussex College in the 1660s; it turned up at the family seat, Houghton Hall, and went back in 1956 with no fine charged.

Melvil Dewey's simplified-spelling zeal led him to briefly spell his surname how?

Dewey briefly signed himself 'Melvil Dui', having already trimmed 'Melville' to 'Melvil'; in 2019 the American Library Association removed his name from its Melvil Dewey Medal over his record of racism, antisemitism and sexual harassment.

Which Venetian adventurer ended his days as a count's librarian in Bohemia, writing his memoirs?

Giacomo Casanova became Count Waldstein's librarian at Dux and died there in 1798; he wrote that he set down his vast life story only to keep from going mad.

Young Mao Zedong worked as an assistant to librarian Li Dazhao at which institution?

Peking University's library gave Mao a lowly assistant's job in the winter of 1918–19 under Li Dazhao, who introduced him to communist ideas and went on to co-found China's Communist Party in 1921.

Which annual reading event did Laura Bush launch in 2001 with the federal library on Capitol Hill?

National Book Festival crowds first gathered on 8 September 2001; Laura Bush, a former librarian, had already founded the Texas Book Festival in 1995 as that state's first lady.

The Folger Library on Capitol Hill owns 82 copies, over a third of those surviving, of which book?

Shakespeare's First Folio survives in 235 known copies, and oil executive Henry Folger bought 82 of them, one after another, for the library that bears his name.

Which event did Judith Krug launch with the American Library Association in 1982?

Banned Books Week answered a sudden surge in attempts to pull books from libraries, schools and shops; publishers brought the idea to Krug, who ran the association's intellectual freedom office.

Since 2007 a book's 13-digit ISBN has doubled as which other number?

Barcode number: the barcode system gives books their own fictitious country, 'Bookland', with the prefixes 978 and 979, so a 13-digit ISBN doubles as the product code.

The ISBN grew out of a book-numbering system devised in the mid-1960s for which UK retailer?

WHSmith announced in 1965 that it wanted a standard number for every book it stocked; Gordon Foster, a statistics professor, devised the nine-digit code, which grew into an international standard in 1970.

In 1996 Kenya's national library service began carrying books to nomads in its arid north-east on which animals?

Camels, three at first, set out from Garissa in October 1996 with boxes of books; Colombia's Biblioburro does the same job with two donkeys named Alfa and Beto.

Which book-sharing movement did Todd Bol start in Hudson, Wisconsin, in 2009?

Little Free Library began as Bol's tribute to his late mother, a teacher who loved to read: he built a model of a one-room schoolhouse, filled it with books and put it on a post in his front yard.

Snøhetta, architects of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, share their name with a mountain in which country, their home?

Norway's Snøhetta won its first big commission in 1989, the revival of Alexandria's ancient library, and later gave Oslo an opera house whose sloping roof the public can walk up.

The Library of Celsus, its facade re-erected in the 1970s, stands in which ancient city in modern Turkey?

Ephesus got the library as a monument to the Roman governor Celsus, built by his son, and Celsus was buried in a marble sarcophagus in a crypt beneath its floor.

Plutarch records a charge that Mark Antony gave Cleopatra 200,000 scrolls taken from which rival library?

Pergamum's library was the prize in a charge laid by an ally of Octavian, though Plutarch adds that most of the man's accusations were thought false; the city also gave parchment its name.

Which invaders destroyed Baghdad's House of Wisdom in 1258, reportedly turning the Tigris black with ink?

The Mongols under Hulagu Khan sacked Baghdad in 1258, ending the Abbasid caliphate that had made the House of Wisdom a public academy under al-Ma'mun four centuries earlier.

Which Argentine author of The Library of Babel became director of the National Library in 1955 as he went blind?

Jorge Luis Borges took charge of the library just as hereditary blindness ended his reading, an irony he turned into verse in his 'Poem of the Gifts'.

Which English poet served as University Librarian at Hull for 30 years from 1955?

Philip Larkin stayed at Hull's university library until his death in 1985, writing most of his poems there, and in 1984 turned down the chance to become Poet Laureate.

Which Buffy the Vampire Slayer character works as the Sunnydale High librarian?

Rupert Giles, Buffy's Watcher, poses as the Sunnydale High librarian so the library can double as the Scooby Gang's base; Anthony Stewart Head, who played him, was known in the US for Taster's Choice commercials.

In which Roald Dahl book does the librarian Mrs Phelps steer a four-year-old towards Dickens?

Matilda has read every children's book in the village library by the age of four, so Mrs Phelps starts her on the classics; Dahl based the library on the one in his own village, Great Missenden.

The song 'Marian the Librarian' comes from which musical, set in River City, Iowa, in 1912?

In The Music Man, con man Harold Hill sings 'Marian the Librarian' to Marian Paroo, the town's prim librarian and piano teacher; Meredith Willson based River City on his hometown of Mason City, Iowa.

In 'Time Enough at Last', Henry Bemis survives the bomb and finds a ruined library, only for what to happen?

Henry Bemis bends to pick up a book and his glasses shatter on the steps, leaving him unable to read; Burgess Meredith played the bank teller in the 1959 Twilight Zone episode.

Which 1985 John Hughes film confines five teenagers to a school library for Saturday detention?

The Breakfast Club's detention takes place in the Shermer High library; Maine North High's real library was too small, so the crew built a larger replica in the school gymnasium.

In the 2004 TNT film The Librarian, Noah Wyle's Flynn Carsen must retrieve and reassemble which artefact?

The Spear of Destiny has been split into three pieces, and Flynn must reach the others before a cult that has stolen one; the film led to two sequels and the 2014 series The Librarians.

The 2003 Nancy Pearl librarian action figure from Archie McPhee performs which action at the push of a button?

Shushing, with a finger to its lips: Pearl said the feature would show 'which librarians have a sense of humor'. She is also known for her Rule of 50, giving a book 50 pages before quitting.

The circular 1857 Reading Room used by Lenin, Gandhi and Bram Stoker sits inside which London institution?

British Museum readers worked under a dome 42.6 metres across, inspired by Rome's Pantheon; Lenin signed in there under the alias Jacob Richter.

Which library holds two of the four surviving 1215 copies of Magna Carta?

British Library copies both came from the 17th-century collector Sir Robert Cotton; one was given to him by a London lawyer who may have found it in a tailor's shop.

Coimbra's Biblioteca Joanina relies on a resident colony of which animals to eat book-damaging insects?

Bats have lived in the Biblioteca Joanina for centuries, emerging at night to eat the insects that would otherwise eat the books; staff cover the 18th-century furniture with leather sheets and clean up the droppings each morning.

Hereford Cathedral holds the world's largest surviving example of what kind of book collection?

Hereford Cathedral's chained library is the largest to survive with its chains, rods and locks intact; the books are shelved spine-inward with chains fixed to the front covers so each can be read at the desk without tangling.

Admont Abbey, home of the largest monastic library in the world, is in which country?

Austria's Admont Abbey, in Styria, lost almost every other building to a fire in 1865, but its library hall and books were saved.

The glowing sphere at the heart of the Tianjin Binhai Library, seen through an oval opening, is nicknamed what?

The Eye sits in an atrium of terraced shelves, but the upper ones cannot be reached, so their 'books' are images printed on aluminium plates.

S. R. Ranganathan's Five Laws of Library Science end with 'A library is a growing' what?

Organism was the word of a maths lecturer who at first found his librarian's job frustrating; Ranganathan was won over only after being sent to London to study how libraries were run.

Which two revolutionaries studied together in a window alcove of Manchester's Chetham's Library in 1845?

Marx and Engels read economics there during Marx's visit in the summer of 1845, three years before their Communist Manifesto; the library, founded in 1653, still shows visitors their window seat.

Project Gutenberg began in 1971 when Michael S. Hart typed in which document?

Declaration of Independence copies were being handed out free at a grocery store that 4 July, and Hart, newly given time on a University of Illinois mainframe, typed his in to share.

The American Library Association was founded during the 1876 Centennial Exposition in which host city?

Philadelphia's world's fair drew 103 librarians to a three-day convention; on its last day a register went round, and those who signed it became the association's charter members.

Bradbury drafted Fahrenheit 451 on a coin-operated typewriter in which university's library?

Bradbury wrote the draft in the basement typing room of UCLA's Powell Library in the early 1950s, feeding dimes into a rented typewriter at ten cents per half hour; the story began as the novella The Fireman.

The forbidden book in The Name of the Rose is a lost work by which ancient philosopher?

Aristotle's lost book on comedy is hidden in the abbey's labyrinthine library by an old monk who thinks laughter a threat to faith and has poisoned its pages.

The Clementinum, with its celebrated Baroque library hall, houses the national library of which country?

Czech Republic: Prague's Clementinum began as a Jesuit college in 1556, and in 1622 the Jesuits moved Charles University's library into it; the National Library is housed there today.

Which president began the presidential library system by giving the nation his papers and part of his Hyde Park estate?

Franklin D. Roosevelt broke with custom: earlier presidents treated their papers as their own, and many were lost or destroyed, so in 1939 he gave his to the government with land for a library.

Which cataloguing format did Henriette Avram develop at the Library of Congress in the late 1960s?

MARC, short for Machine-Readable Cataloging, let computers read catalogue records that had lived on printed cards, so libraries could automate their work and share records electronically.

Which children's author, a librarian in Yakima in 1939, wrote her first book in answer to a young reader's question?

Beverly Cleary's answer was Henry Huggins, published in 1950, about a boy and his dog Ribsy; the little sister of Henry's friend Beezus was Ramona, who went on to star in books of her own.

France's national library traces its origins to a royal library founded by Charles V in 1368 at which palace?

The Louvre's first royal library did not last: after Charles VI died, the English regent, the Duke of Bedford, bought the manuscripts and shipped them to England in 1424, so later kings had to start again.

The Latin word liber, source of 'library', originally named which part of a tree?

Bark: the ancients wrote on the inner bark of trees, so its Latin name, liber, came to mean book, and words built on it gave English 'library'.

The Załuski Library, opened to the public in 1747, was established in which city?

Warsaw lost the collection in 1794, when Russian troops carried it off to St Petersburg; much of what came back in the 1920s was then destroyed in the Second World War.

Which mountain fortress of the Nizari Ismailis, the so-called Assassins, lost its famed library when it surrendered in 1256?

Alamut's conquerors let the historian Juvayni pick through the library first; he saved a few works he judged worth keeping, and the rest was burned.

The 'Library 2.0' concept, a response to the challenge of Google, was coined in which year?

Michael Casey coined 'Library 2.0' on his LibraryCrunch blog in September 2005, borrowing Web 2.0 ideas like tagging, commenting and social networks to make library services more user-driven.

Which architect designed Seattle's 2004 Central Library with its faceted glass-and-steel skin?

Rem Koolhaas and his firm OMA wound the nonfiction shelves into a continuous 'Books Spiral', so the collection runs in one unbroken sequence instead of being split between floors.

In which year was the UK's Library Association, which merged into CILIP in 2002, founded?

The Library Association was founded at a conference in London in October 1877, a year after the American Library Association; it received a royal charter in 1898 and merged with the Institute of Information Scientists in 2002 to form CILIP.

Which country singer's Imagination Library mails free books to children from birth until age five?

Dolly Parton started the scheme in 1995 in her home county in Tennessee as a tribute to her father, who never learned to read. Each child gets one book a month.

Which DC superheroine's alter ego, Dr Barbara Gordon, works as a librarian at Gotham City Public Library?

Barbara Gordon's Batgirl debuted in Detective Comics in January 1967 so that the character could join the Batman TV series later that year, played by Yvonne Craig.

In which 1999 adventure film does Rachel Weisz play Evelyn Carnahan, a librarian in 1920s Cairo?

The Mummy teams Evelyn with treasure hunter Rick O'Connell, played by Brendan Fraser, and the pair accidentally wake the cursed high priest Imhotep.

Harvard's Widener Library honours a young book collector who died aboard which ship?

Titanic survivor Eleanor Elkins Widener paid for the building after the sinking took both her husband and her son Harry, a 1907 Harvard graduate.

Where in Missouri does the central library hide its parking garage behind a 'Community Bookshelf' of 22 giant books?

Kansas City readers suggested the 22 titles on the wall, built in 2004, and each giant book stands about 25 feet tall and 9 feet wide.

Dewey Readmore Books, found abandoned in a library's drop box in January 1988, was which kind of animal?

The cat lived at the public library in Spencer, Iowa, for almost 19 years, and his obituary ran in more than 270 newspapers worldwide.

UC San Diego's futuristic Geisel Library honours a children's author far better known by which pen name?

Dr. Seuss was Theodor Seuss Geisel. After his widow Audrey gave $20 million in 1995, the building that had opened in 1970 as the Central Library took the family name.

Which classic board game's nine rooms include a library, a conservatory and a billiard room?

Cluedo (Clue) was devised in 1943 by Anthony Pratt, a Birmingham musician who thought it up at home during wartime air raids on the city.

In which Disney animated film is the book-loving heroine given an entire castle library as a gift?

Beauty and the Beast voice star Paige O'Hara loved books so much herself that the library scene was among the fastest she recorded.

Which Roots actor hosted the PBS children's book series Reading Rainbow when it launched in 1983?

LeVar Burton introduced children's own book reviews with the catchphrase 'But you don't have to take my word for it', and episodes sent viewers to find the books at the local library.

Which Frank Capra film shows Mary as a spinster librarian in a world without George Bailey?

It's a Wonderful Life has guardian angel Clarence Odbody show George that vision. Capra reportedly came to think that making Mary a librarian had been a mistake.

The Haskell Free Library and Opera House was deliberately built straddling Canada's border with which US state?

Vermont has the front door and most of the theatre seats, while the books and the stage sit in Quebec. A thick black line across the floor marks the border.

Luis Soriano's Biblioburro delivers library books to rural villages on two donkeys, Alfa and Beto, in which country?

Colombia's Caribbean hinterland is his round. The primary school teacher set out in the late 1990s with a portable library of just 70 books.

In which 1994 film does banker Andy Dufresne write weekly letters to the state to fund a prison library?

The Shawshank Redemption sends Andy to the prison's decrepit library to assist elderly inmate Brooks Hatlen, a cover for doing the warden's and the guards' finances.

Which word describes a book about a real person's life that was written by somebody else?

Biography comes in two kinds: an authorized one has the permission of its subject or the subject's heirs, while an unauthorized one is written without it.

Which award, named after an English illustrator, honours each year's most distinguished American picture book?

The Caldecott Medal goes to the illustrator, chosen by a division of the American Library Association, and the medal itself features two of Randolph Caldecott's own illustrations.

In Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels, a magical accident turned the Librarian of Unseen University into which animal?

An orangutan can climb to the high shelves, so the Librarian refused to be changed back. He reacts violently to anyone who calls him a monkey.

The Villa of the Papyri, whose library is the only one to survive whole from antiquity, lies in which Roman town?

Herculaneum was buried by Vesuvius in AD 79, and the heat of the eruption carbonised the villa's 1,800-plus scrolls. The Getty Villa in Malibu is modelled on the house.

Which chief librarian at Alexandria is best remembered as the first known person to calculate Earth's circumference?

Eratosthenes also coined the word 'geography' and was the first to calculate the tilt of Earth's axis.

Some 350,000 manuscripts were carried to safety from the libraries of which Malian city during a 2012–13 conflict?

Timbuktu residents organised by a local manuscripts group saved about 90% of the collections; retreating Islamist rebels still burned or stole 4,203 manuscripts.

Which 1997 film's hero says a pricey education could be had 'for a dollar fifty in late charges at the public library'?

Good Will Hunting gives the line to Matt Damon's Will, a self-taught genius who works as a janitor at MIT.

Which Agatha Christie sleuth from St Mary Mead investigates a stranger's body found in the library at Gossington Hall?

Miss Marple is telephoned by her friend Mrs Bantry, the lady of the house. Christie said she wanted a completely conventional library and a highly improbable body.

In Parks and Recreation, which character's ex-wife Tammy is the director of the Pawnee Public Library?

Ron Swanson's ex-wife is played by Megan Mullally, the real-life wife of Nick Offerman, the actor who plays Ron.

Which Canadian novelist was the first writer to hand a manuscript to the Future Library project, unread until 2114?

Margaret Atwood handed over a text called Scribbler Moon in 2015. A thousand trees were planted to supply the paper when all 100 manuscripts are finally printed.

The Human Library, where visitors 'borrow' people for a conversation instead of books, began in 2000 in which country?

Denmark hosted the first event over four days at Roskilde, run by a youth group called Stop the Violence to challenge people's prejudices.

The Beinecke Library, a windowless box lit through thin translucent marble, holds the rare books of which university?

Yale had the stone milled to just 1.25 inches thick so that daylight filters through in a golden amber glow. A Gutenberg Bible is on show inside.

Which city's public library, founded in 1848, went on to open the first branch library in the United States?

Boston opened that first branch in East Boston in 1870, then added 21 more across the city's neighbourhoods between 1872 and 1900.

Which US president set up the first federally run presidential library on his family estate at Hyde Park, New York?

Franklin Roosevelt and his mother Sara gave 16 acres for the building, dedicated in 1941. Until then, presidents had simply taken their papers with them on leaving office.

Which Renaissance artist designed the Laurentian Library in Florence to house the Medici family's manuscripts?

Michelangelo left Florence in 1534 with only the reading room walls complete, so others finished the job from his plans and spoken instructions.

What name is given to the room of a medieval monastery where monks copied and illuminated manuscripts by hand?

Scriptorium may be an overused term: only some monasteries set aside a special room, and scribes often worked in the library or in their own rooms.

In which Indiana Jones film do Indy and Elsa discover a catacomb hidden beneath a library in Venice?

The Last Crusade has the pair find an inscribed shield down there, which reveals that the path to the Holy Grail begins in Alexandretta.

Which Doctor Who archaeologist, played by Alex Kingston, first appears in the episode 'Silence in the Library'?

River Song summons the Tenth Doctor to a planet-sized library where shadow-dwelling creatures called the Vashta Nerada strip their victims to the bone.

An arson fire in April 1986 destroyed some 400,000 volumes at the Central Library of which US city?

Los Angeles firefighters needed more than seven hours to put the blaze out, and smoke and water damaged another 700,000 volumes.

Which Matt Haig novel sends Nora Seed to a place where every book holds another version of her life?

The Midnight Library sits between life and death with its clocks frozen at midnight, and it is run by a vision of Mrs Elm, Nora's kind old school librarian.

Which reference book of maps takes its name from a 1595 work by the Flemish geographer Gerardus Mercator?

An atlas owes its name to Mercator's tribute to Atlas, a legendary king of Mauretania who was traditionally considered the first great geographer.

In Chris Grabenstein's children's novel, Kyle Keeley must escape a new library designed by which game maker?

Mr. Lemoncello, first name Luigi, credits his success to his childhood public library, and the author hid a secret puzzle in the book for readers to decode.

In A Series of Unfortunate Events, which young character had read most of the Baudelaire library before it burned down?

Klaus is the middle Baudelaire child, twelve when the series begins, and his research skills are often what foils Count Olaf's plans.

In Avatar: The Last Airbender, the spirit Wan Shi Tong guards a vast library in the form of which animal?

An owl in form, he claims to know ten thousand things and stocks his shelves with the help of knowledge-seeking foxes.

The exterior of Vancouver's Central Library, picked through a city design competition, resembles which ancient landmark?

The Colosseum look came from Moshe Safdie's team, whose scheme was the most radical in the competition and yet the public favourite.

The Vijećnica, a national library destroyed by shelling in August 1992, stands in which European capital?

Sarajevo built the Vijećnica as its city hall, and Archduke Franz Ferdinand attended a reception there in June 1914 just before he was shot.

German soldiers set fire to the university library of which Belgian town in 1914, destroying its medieval manuscripts?

Leuven, then better known as Louvain, kept the library in its 14th-century cloth hall. The collection was virtually destroyed within ten hours, and the fire burned for days.

In 2003, chief librarian Alia Muhammad Baker smuggled some 30,000 books to safety in which Iraqi city?

Basra neighbours helped her pass the books over the library's seven-foot wall into the dining room of the restaurant next door before the building was destroyed.

Which German polymath became librarian of the Herzog August Library in Wolfenbüttel in 1691?

Gottfried Leibniz served three successive rulers of the House of Brunswick as historian, political adviser and, most consequentially, keeper of the ducal library.

Which Roman writer told his friend Varro that with a garden and a library 'you have everything you need'?

Cicero's Latin runs 'Si hortum in bibliotheca habes, deerit nihil', from one of the letters collected as Ad Familiares.

Which UK pharmacy chain ran a circulating library, the Book-Lovers' Library, in its shops from 1898 to 1966?

Boots began lending books at the urging of Florence Boot, and stopped after a 1964 law required councils to provide free public libraries.

In a 1991 Seinfeld episode, library cop Lt. Bookman pursues Jerry over which novel, borrowed back in 1971?

Tropic of Cancer had in fact been lent to George, who lost it during a gym-class wedgie; the book Jerry remembered returning was Tropic of Capricorn.

Librarian Mary Titcomb launched a pioneering 'book wagon' in 1905 to reach remote homes in which US state?

Maryland's book wagon was a black Concord wagon bought with a $2,500 Carnegie gift and driven by the library janitor. It lent 1,008 volumes in its first six months.

Which poet at the Library of Alexandria compiled the Pinakes, often considered the West's first library catalogue?

Callimachus was never the head librarian, yet his 120-volume list of authors and their works made him the first known bibliographer.

Which term, from the Latin for 'swaddling clothes' or 'cradle', describes books printed in Europe up to the year 1500?

Incunabula survive in surprising numbers: around 550,000 copies of some 27,500 different works have been preserved worldwide.

Which term describes a manuscript page whose text was scraped or washed off so the page could be reused?

A palimpsest can give up its secrets: multispectral imaging recovered more than 80% of the erased text of the famous Archimedes Palimpsest.