Book Trivia
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121 free Book trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This book trivia quiz is about books as objects and as an industry rather than the stories inside them (for plots, authors and characters, take our Literature quiz). It covers the clay tablets and papyrus scrolls that came before the codex, Bi Sheng and Gutenberg, the Diamond Sutra and the Book of Kells, why paperbacks cost sixpence, how ISBNs and Dewey numbers work, who coined the word 'blurb' and where the dust jacket came from. The easy questions are ones most readers know: the best-selling book of all time, the best-selling novelist, what a hardcover is bound with and what an audiobook used to be called. From there it works through bestsellers and records: Harry Potter's 600 million copies, Don Quixote, The Little Prince's 600 translations, Agatha Christie's two billion, the longest novel, the largest medieval manuscript, the priciest printed book and manuscript ever sold. There are prizes (Booker, Pulitzer, Nobel, Newbery, Caldecott, Hugo), libraries (Congress, British Library, Bodleian, Alexandria, the first bookmobile, Little Free Libraries), retailers and formats, from Penguin and Pocket Books to the Kindle, Project Gutenberg and Kindle Direct Publishing. Every answer was checked against the encyclopaedia entries for the books, institutions and inventions involved before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. Readers may also like our Classic Literature and Children's Books quizzes.
30 of 121 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01From which Old English word does 'book' come?
Boc
Boc was the Old English word; German Buch and Dutch boek are cousins from the same Germanic root, not ancestors, while Rome's liber lives on in 'library'.
Q 02Roughly how many unique books had been published in total, by Google's 2010 estimate?
Around 130 million
Around 130 million: Google's engineers boiled nearly a billion raw catalogue records down to 129,864,880 books, throwing out duplicates, maps, microforms and a turkey probe someone had catalogued as an April Fools' joke.
Q 03The bound book overtook the scroll in the Roman world partly because which group adopted it from the second century on?
Early Christians
Early Christians preferred bound pages for their scriptures while most other literature stayed on rolls: one volume could hold all four Gospels, when Matthew alone nearly filled a scroll.
Q 04Which fantasy classic began as a single line scribbled by an Oxford professor on a blank exam paper he was marking?
The Hobbit
The Hobbit began as one sentence about a hole in the ground, jotted on a blank exam page; Tolkien spun it into a story for his children and passed it round friends, and no publisher saw it until 1936.
Q 05Which novel opens with the sentence 'Call me Ishmael'?
Moby-Dick
Moby-Dick opens with its narrator's three-word introduction, yet the whaling epic flopped in 1851: it sold fewer than 4,000 copies in its author's lifetime and won its fame only in the 20th century.
Q 06Which series of novels has sold more than 600 million copies worldwide?
Harry Potter
Harry Potter has sold more than 600 million copies in over 80 languages, yet the first hardback printing of the first book in 1997 ran to just 500 copies, most of them sent to libraries.
Q 07Which London publisher accepted J. K. Rowling's first novel after twelve others had turned it down?
Bloomsbury
Bloomsbury said yes after its founder, Nigel Newton, took a chapter home to his eight-year-old daughter Alice, who read it and demanded more.
Q 08Which novel, published in two parts in 1605 and 1615, is often called the first modern novel?
Don Quixote
Don Quixote gained a fake sequel from a rival in 1614, so in the real second part the knight changes his route to prove the forgery false and even meets one of its characters.
Q 09Which book became the world's most translated non-religious book in 2017?
The Little Prince
The Little Prince reached its 300th language in April 2017 with Hassanya, a Saharan dialect of Arabic; the French classic first appeared in New York in 1943, as its exiled author's books were banned at home.
Q 10Who is the best-selling novelist of all time, with more than two billion copies sold?
Agatha Christie
Agatha Christie has sold an estimated two billion books, and it began with a dare: her sister Madge challenged her to write a detective story, which became The Mysterious Affair at Styles.
Q 11Which Charles Dickens novel, set during the French Revolution, is often claimed as one of the best-selling novels ever?
A Tale of Two Cities
A Tale of Two Cities began in the very first issue of Dickens's own new weekly, All the Year Round, and ran for 31 instalments in 1859; sales of 200 million have been claimed for it since.
Q 12Which Chinese title, the 'Little Red Book', has print estimates of up to 6.5 billion?
Quotations from Chairman Mao
Quotations from Chairman Mao began in 1964 as a handbook for soldiers, its first run handed out only inside the army; the Cultural Revolution then made it the most printed book of its time, with well over a billion copies.
Q 13Which woodblock-printed scroll, dated 11 May 868, is the oldest dated printed book?
Q 21What is a book printed in Europe before 1501 called?
An incunable
An incunable takes its name from incunabula, the Roman word for swaddling clothes or a cradle, because such books date from the infancy of printing; the cut-off at 1500 is an arbitrary round date.
Q 22Which Venetian printer introduced italic type in 1501 and used a dolphin-and-anchor device?
Aldus Manutius
Aldus Manutius had his punchcutter Francesco Griffo cut the slanted letters to imitate the handwriting of Italian scholars, and first used them in a 1501 edition of Virgil.
Q 23Which punctuation mark debuted in Pietro Bembo's De Aetna, printed in Venice in the 1490s?
The semicolon
The Diamond Sutra
The Diamond Sutra sat in a cave library near Dunhuang that was sealed about a thousand years ago and reopened only in 1900; the explorer Aurel Stein bought the scroll there in 1907 and it is now in London.
Q 14What dedication ends the oldest dated printed book, a Chinese scroll of 868?
'For universal free distribution'
'For universal free distribution': a man named Wang Jie had the scroll made on behalf of his two parents, since in Buddhist belief copying the Buddha's words and giving them away earned merit.
Q 15Who invented movable type around 1040 AD, using ceramic characters?
Bi Sheng
Bi Sheng baked clay characters hard and set them in an iron frame on a bed of resin and wax; he is known only because the scholar Shen Kuo wrote the method down in his Dream Pool Essays.
Q 16The Jikji of 1377, the oldest surviving book printed with movable metal type, was made in which country?
Korea
Korea printed the Jikji, a Buddhist anthology, at Heungdeok Temple 78 years before Gutenberg's Bible; its one surviving volume is in Paris, bought in Seoul by a French diplomat and taken home.
Q 17What was Johannes Gutenberg's trade before he developed the printing press around 1440?
Goldsmith
Gutenberg was a goldsmith by trade; his experience with metal alloys and punch-cutting helped him cast the uniform lead-based type that made his press practical around 1440.
Q 18In which city did Gutenberg print his Bible in the 1450s?
Mainz
Mainz was Gutenberg's home city, but the Bible brought him ruin there: his backer Johann Fust sued over the loans in 1455, and the court handed Fust the printing workshop.
Q 19In which language is the text of the Gutenberg Bible printed?
Latin
Latin: Gutenberg printed the Vulgate, the medieval Church's own version, and its columns of 42 lines give the book its other name, the 42-line Bible.
Q 20Who set up England's first printing press, at Westminster in 1476?
William Caxton
William Caxton learned the craft in Cologne and printed the first book in the English language abroad, in Bruges, before he brought a press home to Westminster.
The semicolon first appears in De Aetna, printed in the mid-1490s; its printer went on to help settle the way both it and the comma are used.
Q 24What was the first book printed in British North America, in 1640?
The Bay Psalm Book
The Bay Psalm Book's verse was so unpolished that none of it stayed in use, yet in 2013 one of the eleven surviving copies, sold by Boston's Old South Church, fetched $14.2 million.
Q 25Who bought Leonardo da Vinci's Codex Leicester for $30.8m in 1994?
Bill Gates
Bill Gates bought it at an auction that billed it as the Codex Hammer, the name its previous owner, Armand Hammer, had tried to give it; the older name Leicester is the one that lasted.
Q 26What is the main subject of Leonardo da Vinci's notebook the Codex Leicester?
The movement of water
The movement of water fills most of its 72 pages, but Leonardo also uses the notebook to argue that fossil shells lie on mountains because the peaks were once sea bed.
Q 27Which Holy Roman Emperor, fascinated by alchemy, reportedly bought the Voynich manuscript for 600 ducats?
Rudolf II
Rudolf II's purchase is known from a letter of the 1660s found with the manuscript, which also passes on the belief that the book was the work of the English friar Roger Bacon.
Q 28Where has the Voynich manuscript been held since 1969?
Yale's Beinecke Library
Yale's Beinecke Library received it as a gift in 1969 from the dealer Hans P. Kraus, who had paid $24,500 for it and then spent years failing to find a buyer at $160,000.
Q 29Which dystopian novel imagines 'firemen' whose job is to burn books?
Fahrenheit 451
Fahrenheit 451 took shape in the basement of a UCLA library, where Ray Bradbury fed a rented typewriter ten cents for every half hour to escape a small house full of young children.
Q 30What is the largest extant medieval illuminated manuscript, nicknamed the Devil's Bible?
Codex Gigas
The Codex Gigas owes its nickname to a full-page portrait of the Devil and a legend that one monk wrote it in a single night with his help; Swedish troops took it from Prague as war booty in 1648.