50 Fun Facts About Paper Towns

In Paper Towns, Radar avoids bringing a date home because his parents own the world's largest collection of what?

Black Santas cover every surface of the Lincoln house, and the craze has a payoff: the parents fly off to buy a late collector's hoard, leaving the place free for a party.

Which Florida attraction do Margo and Quentin sneak into through a drainage ditch to end their night in Paper Towns?

SeaWorld proved an anticlimax, its tanks empty after dark, and the 2015 film dropped the scene once the documentary Blackfish had criticised keeping orcas there.

Which Catskills hamlet, invented by mapmakers, turns out to be Margo's hiding place in Paper Towns?

Agloe began as a made-up dot at a dirt-road junction, yet a real business later took the name, so the invented place ended up existing after all.

Which fish does Margo plant in a drawer, a house and a car on her night of revenge in Paper Towns?

Catfish, three of them, went on Margo's supermarket list beside a dozen tulips, and each fish was delivered with a farewell note to a friend or an ex.

Margo once left alphabet soup with only four different letters as a clue in Paper Towns; which state had she run to?

Mississippi is spelled with just M, I, S and P, yet nobody cracked it, and Margo's father complained it was too big a state to search on so little.

Which animals, standing in the highway at 2:40 a.m., almost end the friends' overnight drive in Paper Towns?

Cows, two of them, filled the lane as Quentin froze; Ben grabbed the wheel and spun the car onto the shoulder, a move that later earned it the name the Dreidel.

In Paper Towns, Margo and Quentin take off the sleeping bully Chuck Parson's right eyebrow using which product?

Hair-removal cream went on while Chuck slept, and wiping it away took the whole eyebrow with it; the target was chosen for Quentin's sake, payback for a prank in a middle-school dance class.

Which British model played Margo Roth Spiegelman in the 2015 film of Paper Towns, winning two Teen Choice Awards?

Cara Delevingne had twice been named Model of the Year at the British Fashion Awards, and her acting career had begun with a minor part in the 2012 film Anna Karenina.

Which graduation present do Quentin's parents give him in Paper Towns on the morning he learns where Margo is?

A minivan was not what Quentin had hoped for: his parents wrongly assumed he loved driving his mother's, but that same day it was carrying four friends out of Florida.

What do Ben and Radar have on under their graduation robes when the dash to find Margo begins in Paper Towns?

No clothes at all, thanks to a pact made at a party to go bare beneath the robes; when the friends skipped the ceremony, outfits had to be bought at the first fuel stop.

Which Florida hometown of author John Green provides the suburban setting for Paper Towns?

Orlando is where John Green went to school, and its sprawl of near-identical subdivisions gave him the paper-thin suburbia Margo rails against from a downtown tower.

A mapmaker's paper town, like the one where Margo hides in Paper Towns, is a fake place added as what?

A copyright trap catches plagiarists: if the invented place turns up on a rival's map, the rival must have copied it rather than surveyed the land.

Which fictional user-edited reference site does Radar keep updating in Paper Towns, even coding a search tool for it?

Omnictionary is where the hunt is solved: Radar's tool lists the opening lines of articles on a region, and a comment under one entry gives Margo away.

Margo leaves behind a highlighted copy of Leaves of Grass in Paper Towns; which American poet wrote it?

Walt Whitman wrote the long poem Song of Myself that Margo marked up, and Quentin's teacher insists it celebrates human connection rather than death.

A poster of which folk singer, hung on Margo's window shade, is the first clue Quentin spots in Paper Towns?

Woody Guthrie appears holding the guitar he famously lettered with an anti-fascist message, and the poster points to an album of covers in Margo's room with one track circled.

Two highlighted lines of verse in Paper Towns lead Quentin to an address clue after he does what to his door?

Unscrewing its hinges exposed a sliver of newspaper with an address in Margo's handwriting; the boys had already tried her door and come away empty-handed.

The address Margo hides for Quentin in Paper Towns leads him and his friends to what kind of place?

An abandoned strip mall is what they find, its office calendars frozen in February 1986; Margo later reveals she spent years of free time there and knew it as the Osprey.

Which quirk of Margo's writing lets Quentin recognise her anonymous online comment near the end of Paper Towns?

Randomly scattered capitals were Margo's signature: she told Quentin the usual rules were unfair to words in the middle, and he first saw the habit on a shopping list.

When the friends finally track Margo down at the end of Paper Towns, where do they find her living?

In an old barn beside a dirt lane, where Margo sat writing in her notebook; she asked for five minutes to finish before greeting anyone.

Where does Margo tell Quentin she is heading next when the two part at the end of Paper Towns?

New York City had long been Margo's idea of the one American place worth living in, and she asks Quentin to come along; he chooses to go home instead.

Reviewers said the central mystery of Paper Towns echoed which earlier John Green novel, his boarding-school debut?

Looking for Alaska, his 2005 debut, drew on Green's own boarding-school years in Alabama and won the Printz Award the year after it appeared.

Which former lead of Nickelodeon's The Naked Brothers Band plays Quentin in the 2015 film of Paper Towns?

Nat Wolff's casting was announced by John Green on Twitter in March 2014, and he and his brother Alex also contributed a song to the soundtrack.

Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber wrote the Paper Towns screenplay after adapting which other John Green novel?

The Fault in Our Stars came out a year earlier from the same producers, and the studio at one point scheduled this follow-up for the day before that hit's first anniversary.

In Paper Towns, which man do nine-year-old Margo and Quentin find dead beneath an oak tree in the prologue?

Robert Joyner had taken his own life over a divorce, as Margo learned by quizzing a neighbour that same day, and her image of strings breaking inside him recurs throughout the book.

Paper Towns is split into three parts named after metaphors: The Strings, The Grass and which other?

The Vessel is Quentin's own image, offered at the end: people begin whole and crack over time, and the cracks are where others finally see in.

Quentin's mother and father in Paper Towns share which profession, one that colours their advice over dinner?

Therapists both, they tell Quentin that people cannot easily see how they appear to others, a remark that reshapes how he pictures Margo.

Quentin and Ben gave Marcus Lincoln the nickname Radar in Paper Towns after a character in which TV series?

M*A*S*H gave the group's brains his name, and on the drive he lives up to it, planning each fuel stop down to a six-minute limit.

The final part of Paper Towns, covering the long drive, labels its sections not with chapter numbers but with what?

Hours tick by one per section, twenty-one in all, as the friends race a noon deadline; the first two parts use ordinary numbered chapters.

What does Quentin's mother call the unfinished, empty housing developments that he searches one by one in Paper Towns?

Pseudovisions are developments dropped before completion, and Quentin pins five of them on a wall map, dreading what he might find at each.

The police officer handling Margo's case in Paper Towns compares her to which object straining against its strings?

A balloon that has finally broken free is how Otis Warren sees Margo, and he warns Quentin that once such a string is cut, nobody can tie it back.

From the twenty-fifth floor of which downtown tower does Margo declare her hometown a paper town in Paper Towns?

The SunTrust Building is open to them only because the night guard, Gus, is an old schoolmate of Margo's; from its windows she picks out their houses and calls the people below paper too.

Ben Starling's nickname in Paper Towns, Bloody Ben, grew out of a rumour about his hospital stay for which illness?

A kidney infection put Ben in hospital in tenth grade, and a classmate's lie about its cause follows him for years, ruining his hunt for a date.

At a late-night party in Paper Towns, a very drunk Ben manages to superglue which homemade object to his own hand?

A beer-can sword, glued end to end, ends up fixed to his hand; Quentin, phoned at three in the morning to be the sober driver, has to get him home with it.

The Spiegelman dog in Paper Towns, Myrna Mountweazel, is named after a fake entry planted in which reference work?

An encyclopedia, the 1975 New Columbia, invented Lillian Virginia Mountweazel, a photographer said to have died in an explosion while on assignment for Combustibles magazine.

Margo funds her night of revenge in Paper Towns with cash she says is left over from which occasion?

Her bat mitzvah money, several hundred dollars of it, pays for everything from spray paint to a bribe for a guard who catches the pair after closing time.

Which creature bites Margo as she and Quentin wade through a drainage ditch on their night out in Paper Towns?

A garter snake did it, though Quentin feared something venomous and gallantly tried to suck out poison that was never there; the two ended up laughing.

Margo's notebook in Paper Towns, later used to plan her schemes, began when she was ten as which piece of writing?

A detective story came first: in it Margo, Quentin and a talking dog solve a murder, and her parents are kinder than in life; plans for pranks were later written over its pages.

What do Margo and Quentin do with her notebook near the end of Paper Towns, as a farewell to childhood?

They bury it nearby, digging with bare fingers at sunset and wishing the children they were godspeed before Margo packs her car.

Which fictional subdivision, named after an orange juice salesman, is home to Quentin and Margo in Paper Towns?

Jefferson Park takes its name from one Doctor Jefferson Jefferson, a rich juice salesman who once owned the land; the dead man of the prologue is found at its centre.

How do Margo's parents react to her latest disappearance in Paper Towns, a move that later makes her scream?

They change the locks and wash their hands of her; Quentin's parents, unimpressed, say Margo would be welcome to live with them until college.

Which prize from the Mystery Writers of America did Paper Towns win in 2009 as the best young adult novel?

An Edgar, the award named after Poe, honours the year's best mystery writing; the novel had opened at number five on a national children's bestseller list.

John Green says he wrote Margo in Paper Towns to take apart which stock character, named by critic Nathan Rabin?

Manic Pixie Dream Girl was coined in 2007 for a quirky love interest who exists only to enliven a brooding man; the novel ends with Quentin seeing that Margo was never that.

The two mapmakers behind the real paper town used in Paper Towns built its name by scrambling what?

Their own initials did the job: Otto Lindberg and his assistant Ernest Alpers mixed up the letters and pinned the result on a dirt-track junction in the Catskills.

Which leading man from an earlier John Green film pops up as a gas station clerk in the film of Paper Towns?

Ansel Elgort plays Mason, a clerk who takes a shine to Lacey; John Green cameos too, heard but never seen, as the father of one of Margo's targets.

Although Paper Towns is set in Florida, the 2015 film was shot mostly in which state for its tax incentives?

North Carolina stood in for the Sunshine State, with a Concord high school renamed for the cameras and the cast dressed for warm weather through a cold late-autumn shoot.

In the film of Paper Towns, unlike the novel, Quentin takes a bus home alone and rejoins his friends at which event?

The senior prom gives the film a warmer ending: Quentin rides a bus back alone to join his friends there, whereas in the book the chase makes all four miss their graduation ceremony.

Which character, who stays home in the novel, joins the drive to find Margo in the film of Paper Towns?

Angela, who is dating Radar, rides along in the film; in the book she stays behind, and the couple's first fight is over her delight in his parents' odd collection.

Which novel does Quentin find among Margo's few belongings, alongside Slaughterhouse-Five, at the end of Paper Towns?

The Bell Jar, by Sylvia Plath, is the one Margo reads a passage from, to show Quentin that ending her life was never what she wanted.

The friends belt out Blister in the Sun on the drive in Paper Towns; which American group released that 1983 song?

Violent Femmes put it on their self-titled debut album; in the book it is Radar who calls for the singalong, to drown out Ben's soppy round of I Spy.

Who directed the 2015 film of Paper Towns, three years after his debut feature Robot & Frank?

Jake Schreier came from commercials and a single indie feature; a decade later he was directing a Marvel superhero film.