Library Trivia
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This library trivia quiz has 117 free questions with answers and walks through the whole story of libraries: the clay tablets of Ashurbanipal and the lost Library of Alexandria, the Bodleian, the Vatican, Trinity College's Long Room and the world's largest national libraries today. You will meet the surprising people who worked the desks (Casanova, Mao Zedong, Philip Larkin, J. Edgar Hoover), the systems that keep the shelves in order (Dewey Decimal, ISBN, MARC) and the records, from a 288-year-overdue book to George Washington's unreturned loan. There are pop-culture rounds too: the ghost in the New York Public Library reading room, Giles at Sunnydale High, Mrs Phelps in Matilda and the detention library of The Breakfast Club. It suits a quiet solo round, a bookish family game or a ready-made round for pub quiz hosts, teachers and library staff running Banned Books Week or National Library Week events. Every answer has been checked against a primary source, and each question shows where it came from, so you can settle disputes on the spot.
30 of 117 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which 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
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.
Q 02In the Dewey Decimal system, which subject occupies the 800s?
Literature
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.
Q 03The Library of Alexandria formed part of which larger institution of scholars?
Mouseion
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'.
Q 04Whose 6,487 books did the US buy in 1815 for $23,950 to restock its national library after the Capitol burned?
Thomas Jefferson
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.
Q 05Which future lawman took his first job at 18 as a messenger in the Library of Congress?
J. Edgar Hoover
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.
Q 06Who became the first woman and the first African American Librarian of Congress in 2016?
Carla Hayden
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.
Q 07Sir Thomas Bodley refounded the main research library of which university in 1602?
Oxford
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'.
Q 08Duke Humfrey's, the Bodleian's oldest reading room, stood in for which fictional location?
The Hogwarts library
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.
Q 09Which illuminated gospel manuscript is the most famous treasure of Trinity College Dublin's Old Library?
Book of Kells
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.
Q 10Trinity College Dublin's Long Room bears a striking resemblance to an archive seen in which film franchise?
Star Wars
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.
Q 11Which pope, builder of the Sistine Chapel, formally founded the Vatican Library by papal bull in 1475?
Sixtus IV
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.
Q 12Which New York mayor nicknamed the NYPL's marble lions Patience and Fortitude in the 1930s?
Fiorello La Guardia
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.
Q 13Before the 1930s, what were the NYPL lions' original names, honouring two of the library's founders?
Q 21The most overdue library book, returned after 288 years, was borrowed by which prime minister's father?
Robert Walpole
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.
Q 22Melvil Dewey's simplified-spelling zeal led him to briefly spell his surname how?
Dui
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.
Q 23Which Venetian adventurer ended his days as a count's librarian in Bohemia, writing his memoirs?
Leo Astor and Leo Lenox
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.
Q 14Which 1984 hit opens with a librarian fleeing in terror from the basement stacks of the New York Public Library?
Ghostbusters
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.
Q 15The Royal Library of Ashurbanipal, over 30,000 clay tablets, was found at which ancient Assyrian capital?
Nineveh
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.
Q 16Which famous ancient poem was among the holdings of Ashurbanipal's 7th-century BC library?
Epic of Gilgamesh
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.
Q 17About how many libraries did Andrew Carnegie's money build worldwide between 1883 and 1929?
2,500
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.
Q 18Andrew Carnegie's first public library opened in 1883 in his birthplace, in which country?
Scotland
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.
Q 19Which pioneering subscription institution, America's first of its kind, did Franklin and his Junto found in 1731?
The Library Company
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.
Q 20Which US president borrowed The Law of Nations from the New York Society Library in 1789 and never returned it?
George Washington
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.
Giacomo Casanova
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.
Q 24Young Mao Zedong worked as an assistant to librarian Li Dazhao at which institution?
Peking University
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.
Q 25Which annual reading event did Laura Bush launch in 2001 with the federal library on Capitol Hill?
National Book Festival
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.
Q 26The Folger Library on Capitol Hill owns 82 copies, over a third of those surviving, of which book?
Shakespeare's First Folio
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.
Q 27Which event did Judith Krug launch with the American Library Association in 1982?
Banned Books Week
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.
Q 28Since 2007 a book's 13-digit ISBN has doubled as which other number?
Barcode 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.
Q 29The ISBN grew out of a book-numbering system devised in the mid-1960s for which UK retailer?
WHSmith
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.
Q 30In 1996 Kenya's national library service began carrying books to nomads in its arid north-east on which animals?
Camels
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.