70 Fun Facts About Library

Which system, first published in 1876, sorts library books into ten main classes?

Each of the ten classes splits into ten divisions and each of those into ten sections, and by 2009 the scheme was in use in some 200,000 libraries across at least 135 countries.

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

Religion sits in the 200s, pure science in the 500s and history and geography close out the scheme in the 900s.

The Library of Alexandria was part of a larger institution dedicated to the Muses. What was it called?

The word survives in English as 'museum'; the Serapeum was a separate temple in the city that later held an offshoot collection.

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

The former president's books covered philosophy, science and cookery as well as law, and they broadened the collection far beyond the legal texts Congressmen had used before.

J. Edgar Hoover took his first job at 18 as an entry-level messenger at which institution?

Hoover later credited the job with teaching him the value of collating material, a habit that shaped the FBI's vast filing systems.

Which post did Carla Hayden become the first woman and the first African American to hold in 2016?

The office dates back to 1802, and its holder also oversees the United States Copyright Office.

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

Readers still recite a declaration promising not to remove, mark or deface any volume, and the Bodleian is one of six legal deposit libraries entitled to a copy of every UK publication.

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

Oxford scholars know the library simply as 'Bodley' or 'the Bod', and it still operates principally as a reference library where nothing may be borrowed.

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

It shares the building with the 15th-century Brian Boru harp, the oldest of its kind in Ireland.

The Jedi Archives in Episode II are said to resemble the 65-metre Long Room of which library?

The room was built between 1712 and 1732, and the library holds legal-deposit rights to a copy of every book published in the UK.

Which pope formally established the Vatican Library by papal bull on 15 June 1475?

The same pope gave his name to the Sistine Chapel; the library today holds about 75,000 codices and 1.1 million printed books.

The oldest known nearly complete manuscript of the Bible, Codex Vaticanus, is held by which institution?

The library admits anyone who can document their research needs and sees around 4,000 to 5,000 scholars a year.

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

He chose the names because he felt New Yorkers would need both qualities to get through the Great Depression; Patience sits on the south side and Fortitude on the north.

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

The building they guard opened on 23 May 1911 on the site of the old Croton Reservoir and is officially the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building.

The 1984 film Ghostbusters opens with a ghost terrorising the main reading room of which institution?

Filming was only allowed in the early morning and had to wrap by 10 a.m.; director Ivan Reitman said the test audience's reaction to that scene told him the film worked.

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

Austen Henry Layard is credited with the discovery, and most of the tablets were taken to England, where they remain in a London museum.

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

Ashurbanipal was the last great king of the Assyrian Empire, and the majority of his tablets survive only in badly fragmented form.

How many Carnegie libraries were built worldwide between 1883 and 1929?

Most of them, 1,689, went up in the United States, with 660 in the UK and Ireland and 125 in Canada; the whole programme cost Carnegie about $56 million.

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

Dunfermline got the first one; Carnegie also pioneered open shelves so readers could fetch their own books, which cut staffing costs.

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

It effectively served as the national legislature's library until the federal capital moved in 1800.

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

The library found the gap during a 2010 ledger inventory, waived the theoretical $300,000 fine, and staff from Mount Vernon replaced the book with an identical edition.

The record-overdue library book, 288 years, was borrowed in 1667-68 from Sidney Sussex College at which university?

The borrower was Colonel Robert Walpole, father of Britain's first prime minister; the historian J. H. Plumb found it at Houghton Hall in 1956 and no fine was charged.

Melvil Dewey opened the world's first library school in January 1887 at which university?

The first class had 20 students, 17 of them women; Dewey had already founded the Library Bureau to sell index cards and filing cabinets while still a student.

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

He also trimmed 'Melville' to 'Melvil'; in 2019 the American Library Association stripped his name from its top medal over his record of racism, antisemitism and harassment.

Casanova spent his final years as librarian at the Castle of Dux, in which historic region?

He found the job dull and considered suicide, then decided instead to write his memoirs, Histoire de ma vie, which he worked on until his death.

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

Li Dazhao's essays on the Russian Revolution helped introduce Marxism to Chinese circles, and he went on to become an early Chinese Communist.

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

She had already started the Texas Book Festival in 1995 and holds a master's in library science from the University of Texas at Austin.

Banned Books Week, first held in 1982, takes place during the last full week of which month?

The picture book And Tango Makes Three, about two male penguins raising a chick, has repeatedly topped the most-challenged lists it highlights.

Which First Amendment and library activist founded Banned Books Week in 1982?

The Association of American Publishers brought her the idea and she ran with it through the American Library Association's intellectual freedom office.

How many digits does an ISBN assigned on or after 1 January 2007 have?

The extra digits let the number double as a barcode: the old ten-digit form is prefixed with 978, the so-called Bookland country code.

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

The scheme was designed by Gordon Foster, a professor of statistics, and became international standard ISO 2108 in 1970.

In Kenya, a national mobile library service reaches readers in Garissa and Wajir using which animals?

Colombia's Biblioburro does the same job with a teacher and two donkeys named Alfa and Beto, while an 1858 'perambulating library' in Warrington was among Britain's first mobile libraries.

The first Little Free Library was built by Todd Bol in 2009 in Hudson, in which US state?

He shaped it like a one-room schoolhouse as a tribute to his late mother, a teacher; more than 150,000 registered boxes now exist worldwide.

Snøhetta, which designed the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, is based in which country?

The design beat 524 other entries; the Internet Archive later donated a mirror of 10 billion web pages to be housed inside.

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

It was built in the 110s AD as a funerary monument for a Roman consul and held around 12,000 scrolls, making it the third-largest library of the Greco-Roman world.

Per Plutarch, Mark Antony gave Cleopatra 200,000 scrolls seized from which rival library?

A later legend claimed parchment was invented there because Egypt cut off papyrus exports, though parchment was in use in Anatolia long before.

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

It began as a library for the caliph Harun al-Rashid and was turned into a public academy under his son al-Ma'mun.

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

He had earlier worked as an assistant at a small municipal library, finishing his cataloguing in about an hour and writing in the basement for the rest of the day.

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

During his tenure the library's stock sextupled and its budget rose from £4,500 to £448,500, and colleagues called him a great figure in post-war British librarianship.

In Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Buffy's Watcher Rupert Giles holds which job at Sunnydale High?

Anthony Stewart Head, who played him, was best known in the US for a run of Taster's Choice coffee commercials before the show.

What is the name of the kindly librarian in Roald Dahl's Matilda?

Dahl based her library on the real one in Great Missenden, the Buckinghamshire village where he lived.

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

Con man Harold Hill sings it to the town's prim librarian and piano teacher; Meredith Willson based River City on his hometown of Mason City.

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

Burgess Meredith played the bank teller who finally has all the time in the world to read and no way to do it.

The Breakfast Club teens serve their Saturday detention in which part of Shermer High School?

The real room at Maine North High was too small, so the crew built a near-identical but larger set inside the school's gym.

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

The secret Library he guards also holds Excalibur and the Ark, and the films spawned the series The Librarians in 2014.

The 2003 Nancy Pearl librarian action figure from Archie McPhee came with which 'push to' action?

The doll delighted some librarians and dismayed others who felt it reinforced a stereotype; Pearl herself is famous for the 'Rule of 50' on when to abandon a book.

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

Its dome, inspired by the Pantheon in Rome, spans 42.6 metres; the national library moved out to St Pancras after the room closed in 1997.

By catalogued items, which institution holds the world's largest collection, over 200 million?

It was created on 1 July 1973 by an Act of Parliament and holds a room devoted solely to Magna Carta.

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

Staff cover the 18th-century furniture with leather sheets each night and clean up the droppings every morning.

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

The 229 volumes are shelved spine-inward with chains fixed to the covers, so a book can be lifted to the desk without tangling.

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

The Benedictine abbey sits on the Enns River in Styria, and the hall's ceiling frescoes are by Bartolomeo Altomonte.

The Tianjin Binhai Library's luminous spherical auditorium is nicknamed what?

Its terraced shelves can hold 1.2 million books, but many upper 'books' in the opening-day photos were spines printed onto the shelf backs.

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

The Indian mathematician-librarian's first law is simply 'Books are for use', and the fourth tells librarians to save the time of the reader.

Which two revolutionaries met at Manchester's Chetham's Library in 1845?

Founded in 1653 under Humphrey Chetham's will, it still shows visitors the window alcove where the pair studied economics texts.

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

The collection has since grown to nearly 78,000 free items.

In which city was the American Library Association founded in 1876?

It was born at the Centennial Exposition when 103 librarians answered a call for a convention, though its headquarters today is in Chicago.

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

The machine in Powell Library cost ten cents per half hour, and the story began life as a novella called The Fireman.

The forbidden book in The Name of the Rose is the lost second half of whose Poetics?

The blind librarian Jorge of Burgos who guards it is a nod to a famous blind Argentine writer, whose story about an infinite library inspired the maze.

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

Jesuits ran the complex from 1556 until 1773, and after Prague Castle it is the second-largest group of buildings in the city.

Which US state was home to the Peterborough Town Library, the world's first tax-supported public library?

Britain followed with the Public Libraries Act of 1850, which let boroughs fund free libraries from the rates.

Which machine-readable cataloguing standard did Henriette Avram develop at the US national library in the late 1960s?

The format turned paper catalogue cards into computer records and remains the international standard for bibliographic data.

Beverly Cleary worked as a children's librarian in Yakima, in which state?

Her characters drew on the children she met at Saturday story hours as much as on her own childhood.

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

Its Richelieu site was the main home for 275 years, from 1721 to 1996, and its digital arm Gallica now serves readers online.

The word 'library' derives from liber, a Latin word meaning what?

Most other European languages instead use forms of the Greek bibliothēkē, 'book container'.

The oldest modern public library, the Załuski Library, was established in 1732 in which city?

It ultimately evolved into the National Library of Poland.

Which country has the world's highest number of registered library borrowers per capita?

Over half of its population are registered borrowers.

The Mongols torched the famed library of the Nizaris at which fortress in 1256?

The conqueror Juwayni boasted that its fame 'had spread throughout the world'.

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

It borrowed Web 2.0 ideas like tagging, commenting and social networks to make libraries more user-driven.

Which national library has the most branches cited on Wikipedia's library page, with 685?

By comparison, Canada's London Public Library has 16 branches and Helsinki's metropolitan system 63.

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

Research Libraries UK is a separate consortium of university and research libraries.