Printing Press Trivia
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100 free Printing Press trivia questions with answers — technology quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Printing press trivia for history buffs, book lovers, students and pub-quiz setters. The quiz starts long before Gutenberg, with Bi Sheng's baked-clay type in Song-dynasty China and the Korean Jikji of 1377, then follows the goldsmith from Mainz through his mirror-selling misadventure, the loans from Johann Fust, the 42-line Bible and the lawsuit that cost him his workshop. From there it tracks the press across the world - Caxton at Westminster, the first presses in Mexico City and Goa, the Ottoman press of Ibrahim Muteferrika - and into the industrial age of Lord Stanhope's iron press, Koenig's steam machines at The Times, Hoe's rotary press and the hot-metal Linotype and Monotype. There are questions on how a hand press actually worked (frisket, rounce, ink balls), what the Gutenberg Bible cost and how many survive, the friars who thought printing was a menace, and what economists have measured about cities that got presses early. Roughly a third of the questions are easy, a third medium and the rest are for people who know their incunabula. Every answer has been checked against a reference page and each question shows its source once you have answered.
30 of 100 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which German city did Johannes Gutenberg set up the workshop where he printed his famous Bible?
Mainz
Mainz, his birthplace, founded the Gutenberg Museum in 1900 to mark his 500th birthday, though 1400 is only a convenient guess: nobody knows the year he was born.
Q 02Gutenberg built his printing press around 1440, in the middle of which period of European history?
The Renaissance
The Renaissance: cheap printed books carried its ideas far beyond a learned few, raising literacy across Europe and letting writers publish in everyday languages rather than Latin.
Q 03What was Gutenberg's trade before he turned to printing?
Goldsmith
Goldsmith: his knowledge of metals helped him devise a hard-wearing type alloy and a hand mould that could cast identical letters quickly and in quantity.
Q 04Gutenberg's type metal was an alloy of lead, tin and which third metal?
Antimony
Antimony went into an alloy that melted at a low temperature, so letters could be cast quickly and cheaply, yet set hard enough to survive thousands of impressions.
Q 05Gutenberg's printing fluid, unlike the traditional water-mixed inks, was made with what base?
Oil
Oil: the water-based inks used for writing by hand would not cling to metal type, so he developed a thicker ink that would.
Q 06Gutenberg's Bible reproduces the Vulgate, the Latin translation made in the fourth century by which saint?
St Jerome
St Jerome's Vulgate was the Bible of the medieval Western Church, and Gutenberg set most of its pages in two columns of 42 lines, which is why it is also called the 42-line Bible.
Q 07About a quarter of Gutenberg's Bibles were printed on vellum, a fine parchment named from the Old French for which animals?
Calves
Calves: buyers expected vellum in a luxury book, but paper was cheaper and easier to print on, so about three-quarters of the edition was printed on paper instead.
Q 08Which American library holds three Gutenberg Bibles, more than any other institution in the world?
The Morgan Library
The Morgan Library grew out of banker J. P. Morgan's private collection of rare books, which is how one institution came to own three of the roughly 50 surviving copies.
Q 09Which US state's flagship university has kept a complete Gutenberg Bible on permanent display since acquiring it in 1978?
Texas
Texas: the university in Austin bought one of the last complete copies ever sold, and because none has come to market since 1978, experts can only guess that one would now fetch tens of millions of dollars.
Q 10Which moneylender financed Gutenberg's press with two 800-guilder loans, then sued him and won the Bible workshop?
Johann Fust
Johann Fust claimed 2,026 guilders with interest, won his case in 1455, and carried on printing with Gutenberg's own chief workman, who went on to marry his daughter.
Q 11Which former Paris copyist, Gutenberg's chief workman, went on to run the printing business with its financier?
Peter Schöffer
Peter Schöffer testified against Gutenberg in the 1455 lawsuit, became the financier's son-in-law, and kept the press running for almost fifty years.
Q 12Which future pope wrote in March 1455 that he had seen Gutenberg Bible pages in Frankfurt?
Pius II
Pius II, then an Italian bishop, praised pages so clean that they could be read without glasses, and reported that buyers had already been found for every copy.
Q 13Around 1439 Gutenberg lost money making metal mirrors for pilgrims to which city's relic exhibition?
Aachen
Q 21Gutenberg modelled his machine on the screw press, which the Romans had used mainly for what?
Pressing grapes and olives
Pressing grapes and olives had been the screw press's farm job since Roman times, and Gutenberg may also have drawn on the similar presses German paper mills already used.
Q 22Which book format, which had replaced the scroll by about AD 500, was one of the technologies Gutenberg combined?
The codex
The codex, a stack of bound pages, beat the scroll because both sides of every leaf could be used and a reader could turn straight to any passage without unrolling.
Q 23Before wood pulp took over in the 1800s, Europe's paper mills made their sheets mainly from what?
Aachen put off its display of Charlemagne's relics for a year, so the mirrors, meant to catch the relics' holy light for pilgrims, had no buyers when the money ran out.
Q 14In which city did Gutenberg live from 1434 to 1444, teaching partners gem-polishing while experimenting in secret?
Strasbourg
Strasbourg has since named a central square after him, though nobody knows what he printed there, if anything: the surviving records speak only of a secret enterprise.
Q 15Gutenberg's 1465 title of Hofmann came with a stipend, a court outfit and tax-free allowances of what?
Grain and wine
Grain and wine came from Archbishop Adolf of Nassau, the same man whose troops had sacked Gutenberg's home city three years earlier and driven many of its printers abroad.
Q 16Who invented the world's first movable-type system, in China around 1040?
Bi Sheng
Bi Sheng was a commoner, so almost nothing is known of his life: his method survives only because the scholar Shen Kuo described it in his Dream Pool Essays.
Q 17The first movable type, made in Song-dynasty China in the 11th century, was formed from what material?
Baked clay
Baked clay won out over wood, which was tried at the same time but dropped because the blocks swelled unevenly once they were soaked in ink.
Q 18What is the name of the oldest surviving book printed with metal movable type, produced in Korea in 1377?
Jikji
Jikji records on its own last page that it was printed with metal type at Heungdeok Temple in 1377, which is how it can be dated to generations before Gutenberg.
Q 19Around 1298 the Yuan official Wang Zhen carved more than 30,000 wooden types to print 100 copies of what?
A county gazetteer
A county gazetteer, the Records of Jingde County, took only about a month to print because Wang sorted his type by rhyme on two revolving tables that brought each character to hand.
Q 20What feature of Chinese writing made movable type far costlier to use there than in alphabetic Europe?
Thousands of characters
Thousands of characters meant a vast, costly stock of type for a single book, whereas a European compositor could set any text from a few dozen letters.
Old rags
Old rags, chiefly linen, were pulped to make paper: the sheets of Gutenberg's own Bible are linen fibre, and their watermarks suggest they were imported from Italy.
Q 24Which Italian trading city had become the printing capital of Europe within thirty years of Gutenberg's Bible?
Venice
Venice took up the German invention quickly, and its presses went on to pioneer small editions of the classics that a reader could carry about.
Q 25Francis Bacon named printing among three inventions that had changed the world, along with the compass and what?
Gunpowder
Gunpowder: Bacon wrote in 1620 that the three had changed the face of the world yet called their origins obscure, unaware that all of them had first appeared in China.
Q 26Whose short, cheaply printed pamphlets poured from the presses in hundreds of editions around 1520?
Martin Luther
Martin Luther wrote mostly in everyday German rather than Latin, so his pamphlets reached readers with little schooling, and by 1530 they had run to more than 2,000 printings.
Q 27What is the term for surviving books printed in Europe before 1501?
Incunabula
Incunabula is Latin for 'swaddling clothes': the name casts the 1400s as printing's infancy, though the cut-off at 1500 is an arbitrary line, chosen for convenience.
Q 28Who built the first iron printing press by 1800, able to print a whole sheet in a single pull?
Lord Stanhope
Lord Stanhope, an earl and inventor, also improved and promoted the stereotype, a whole page cast as one solid metal plate, so a book could be reprinted without resetting it.
Q 29Which newspaper was first printed on Friedrich Koenig's steam-driven cylinder presses in 1814?
The Times
The Times had the machines tried out amid great secrecy, for fear of how its hand pressmen would react, and printed its first steam-powered issue on 29 November 1814.
Q 30Who patented the 'lightning press' in 1847, a rotary machine with its type fixed to a revolving cylinder?
Richard M. Hoe
Richard M. Hoe built on a rotary press that Josiah Warren had shown in New York in 1832 but chose not to patent, which left Hoe free to imitate it and patent his own.