Reading Trivia
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109 free Reading trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
53 free reading trivia questions with answers. This is trivia about reading rather than about any one book: how the eye actually moves across a line, why silent reading once seemed remarkable, how Louis Braille built a tactile alphabet at fifteen, and what dyslexia is. It also covers the machinery that put words in front of readers: Chinese porcelain type, the Gutenberg Bible, the codex, sixpenny Penguins, the ISBN, the Kindle, and the audiobook. The rest is the culture of reading. Libraries from Alexandria to Carnegie's 1,689, the Dewey Decimal System, Jefferson's books rescuing Congress's collection, Reading Rainbow, Oprah's Book Club, Dolly Parton's Imagination Library, Little Free Libraries, Banned Books Week, and the Dr. Seuss books written from tiny word lists to kill off Dick and Jane. Fifty-three questions, roughly a third easy enough for a school library quiz, the rest for teachers, librarians and book-club regulars. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the people, institutions and inventions involved, and each question carries the sentence that supports it.
30 of 109 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01How many raised dots make up a full braille cell?
Six
Six dots, in two columns of three, give 64 combinations counting the blank cell; Braille shrank an earlier twelve-dot code so that a single fingertip could feel a whole character at once.
Q 02Louis Braille was blinded at three by which tool in his father's workshop?
An awl
An awl slipped as three-year-old Louis tried to punch holes in leather like his father, a harness maker; infection spread to both eyes, and by five he was completely blind.
Q 03Braille's code was an improvement on 'night writing', a tactile system invented by whom?
Charles Barbier
Charles Barbier's raised-dot 'night writing' coded sounds rather than letters, in cells of up to twelve dots; Braille's fix was a cell small enough to read with one touch of a fingertip.
Q 04What French term did Émile Javal apply to the short, rapid jumps the eyes make while reading?
Saccades
Saccades, French for 'jerks', was the word Émile Javal used from 1879 for the rapid jumps between fixations; he saw that the eyes do not glide along a line of text but hop and pause.
Q 05In his Confessions, Saint Augustine recalls watching which bishop of Milan read silently instead of aloud?
Ambrose
Ambrose read with his eyes while 'his voice and tongue were silent', Augustine wrote; the passage is often cited as proof that ancient readers normally read aloud, though scholars now doubt silent reading was rare.
Q 06Which teacher is credited with coining 'speed reading' and launched Reading Dynamics in Washington, D.C. in 1959?
Evelyn Wood
Evelyn Wood, a Utah teacher, opened her first Reading Dynamics institute in 1959 and taught students to pace their eyes with a hand swept down the page; the term 'speed reading' is credited to her.
Q 07About how many words a minute does the average adult read silently in English?
About 240
About 240 words a minute is what a 2019 review of 190 studies found: 238 for English non-fiction and 260 for fiction, lower than the figures usually quoted, while reading aloud averaged just 183.
Q 08What is the name for loss of the ability to read after brain injury?
Alexia
Alexia is reading lost to brain damage, most often a stroke; in the 'pure' form that Jules Dejerine described, patients can still write sentences but can no longer read them.
Q 09What material did Bi Sheng use to make the first known movable type, around 1040?
Baked clay
Baked clay is what Shen Kuo's account describes: Bi Sheng cut each character into sticky clay, fired it hard, and set the pieces on an iron plate coated with resin, wax and paper ash.
Q 10In which city did Johannes Gutenberg print his Bible in the 1450s?
Mainz
Mainz is where Gutenberg printed his Bible around 1454–55; his backer Johann Fust then sued to recover 1,600 guilders in loans, won, and went on printing with Peter Schöffer, who had worked in Gutenberg's shop.
Q 11How many lines per page give the Gutenberg Bible its other name?
42
It is called the 42-line Bible because its columns of type run to 42 lines, which tells it apart from the 36-line Bible printed a few years later, probably in Bamberg.
Q 12Which Buddhist text, printed on 11 May 868, is considered the oldest dated printed book?
The Diamond Sutra
The Diamond Sutra scroll, a Chinese translation bearing the date 11 May 868, was found in the Dunhuang caves in 1900 by the Daoist monk Wang Yuanlu and bought by Aurel Stein in 1907; it is in the British Library.
Q 13What is the name for the paged book format that gradually replaced the scroll in the ancient world?
The codex
Q 21The first modern tax-supported public library, opened in 1833, was in which small New Hampshire town?
Peterborough
Peterborough, New Hampshire, voted in 1833 to fund a town library from tax money, a first for the United States; Boston's public library was authorised in 1848, and Andrew Carnegie later paid for 1,689 American libraries.
Q 22Which Roman is said to have accidentally burned part of the Library of Alexandria during his civil war in 48 BC?
Julius Caesar
Julius Caesar, besieged in Alexandria, set fire to ships in the harbour; ancient writers say the blaze spread ashore and destroyed part of the library's collection, though the library was still in use long afterwards.
Q 23The Book of Kells, an illuminated Gospel book from around 800 AD, is on display at which institution?
The codex, pages bound along one edge, takes its name from Latin caudex, a tree trunk or wooden block; it could be opened at any point and written on both sides, and early Christians adopted it widely.
Q 14Before paper, book pages were typically parchment or vellum, made from what?
Animal hides
Parchment and vellum are animal hides — sheep, goat or calf skin — soaked in lime, scraped and stretched; vellum strictly means calfskin, and the word parchment comes from Pergamon in Asia Minor.
Q 15The first Penguin paperbacks of 1935 were sold through Woolworths for what price?
Sixpence
Sixpence was all an early Penguin cost; the story goes that Allen Lane had the idea in 1934 after finding nothing worth reading at the Exeter St Davids bookstall on his way back from visiting Agatha Christie.
Q 16Which German publisher's colour-coded paperback covers did Penguin copy in 1935?
Albatross Books
Albatross Books of Hamburg supplied the template: Allen Lane borrowed its standard size, lettering-only covers and colour coding by genre, and later hired Albatross co-founder Kurt Enoch to run Penguin in America.
Q 17Melvil Dewey worked out his decimal classification in 1873 while working in the library of which Massachusetts college?
Amherst
Amherst College is where Dewey devised the scheme as a student, tried it out on the library's own books, and published it in 1876 as a slim pamphlet; it now fills several volumes.
Q 18Whose 6,487 books did Congress buy to rebuild its library after the British burned Washington in 1814?
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson sold Congress his 6,487 volumes in 1815 for $23,950; a fire in 1851 destroyed about two-thirds of them, and the library's main building, opened in 1897, carries his name.
Q 19The Bodleian Library, founded in 1602, is the main research library of which university?
Oxford
The Bodleian is the University of Oxford's main research library; Sir Thomas Bodley refounded it in 1602, half a century after the earlier library had been stripped of its books and even its shelves.
Q 20Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels studied together in 1845 at Chetham's Library, founded in 1653, in which English city?
Manchester
Manchester's Chetham's Library is the oldest public library in the English-speaking world; in 1870 Engels wrote to Marx that he had again been sitting at the alcove desk they once shared and was 'very fond of the place'.
Trinity College Dublin
Trinity College Dublin was given the Book of Kells in 1661 and shows it in its Old Library; monks of St Columba's order made it, perhaps partly on Iona, before Viking raids drove them to Kells.
Q 24Which abbreviation names the 13-digit code that identifies each edition of a published book?
ISBN
ISBN stands for International Standard Book Number; the codes had ten digits until the end of 2006 and 13 from 2007, so that they fit the EAN barcode system used on other retail goods.
Q 25Which display technology have Kindle e-readers used since the first model of 2007?
E Ink
E Ink moves charged black and white pigments inside tiny capsules and can hold a page on screen with no power at all, which is why it reads like paper and uses so little battery.
Q 26Which actress launched a book club in 2017 whose picks include Where the Crawdads Sing?
Reese Witherspoon
Reese Witherspoon picked Delia Owens's debut novel in September 2018, weeks after it came out; her company Hello Sunshine then optioned it, and she produced the 2022 film.
Q 27World Book and Copyright Day, 23 April, was fixed on the traditional death date of which author?
Miguel de Cervantes
Miguel de Cervantes died in April 1616 and was buried on the 23rd, the date also given for Shakespeare's death; Spain first held its book day on 7 October 1926, his presumed birthday, moving it to 23 April in 1930.
Q 28International Literacy Day, marked each 8 September since 1967, was proclaimed by which United Nations agency?
UNESCO
UNESCO proclaimed the day in 1966 and marks it each year by awarding its literacy prizes, one of them named for King Sejong, who created the Korean alphabet.
Q 29Which book has reportedly been translated into more languages than any other except the Bible?
The Little Prince
The Little Prince has reportedly been translated into hundreds of languages, more than any book but the Bible; Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote it in exile in New York and vanished on a reconnaissance flight in 1944, a year after it appeared.
Q 30Which seven-volume French novel holds the Guinness World Record for longest novel?
In Search of Lost Time
In Search of Lost Time runs to some 1.2 million words across seven volumes published from 1913 to 1927; Proust paid Grasset to issue the first, Swann's Way, after the NRF turned it down.