130 free Book trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This book trivia quiz is about books as objects and as an industry rather than the stories inside them (for plots, authors and characters, take our Literature quiz). It covers the clay tablets and papyrus scrolls that came before the codex, Bi Sheng and Gutenberg, the Diamond Sutra and the Book of Kells, why paperbacks cost sixpence, how ISBNs and Dewey numbers work, who coined the word 'blurb' and where the dust jacket came from. The easy questions are ones most readers know: the best-selling book of all time, the best-selling novelist, what a hardcover is bound with and what an audiobook used to be called. From there it works through bestsellers and records: Harry Potter's 600 million copies, Don Quixote, The Little Prince's 600 translations, Agatha Christie's two billion, the longest novel, the largest medieval manuscript, the priciest printed book and manuscript ever sold. There are prizes (Booker, Pulitzer, Nobel, Newbery, Caldecott, Hugo), libraries (Congress, British Library, Bodleian, Alexandria, the first bookmobile, Little Free Libraries), retailers and formats, from Penguin and Pocket Books to the Kindle, Project Gutenberg and Kindle Direct Publishing. Every answer was checked against the encyclopaedia entries for the books, institutions and inventions involved before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. Readers may also like our Classic Literature and Children's Books quizzes.
30 of 130 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01From which Old English word does 'book' come?
Boc
Old Norse has bok and Old Saxon bok.
Q 02Roughly how many unique books had been published in total, by Google's 2010 estimate?
Around 130 million
Google Books had scanned over 40 million by 2019.
Q 03What is the name of the format, of pages bound at one edge, that replaced the scroll?
The codex
The Romans developed it from wax tablets.
Q 04According to Guinness World Records, what is the best-selling book of all time?
The Bible
An estimated 5 to 7 billion copies.
Q 05What is the estimated total sales figure for the Christian Bible?
Over five billion copies
It is translated into about half the world's languages.
Q 06Which series has sold more than 600 million copies, the most in history?
Harry Potter
It roughly ties with the manga One Piece.
Q 07How many publishers rejected the first Potter book before Bloomsbury took it?
Twelve
Scholastic published it in the US.
Q 08Which novel, published in 1605 and 1615, is believed to have sold over half a billion copies?
Don Quixote
It is often called the first modern novel.
Q 09Which book became the world's most translated non-religious book in 2017?
The Little Prince
It reached 600 languages and dialects by 2024.
Q 10Who is the best-selling novelist of all time, with more than two billion copies sold?
Agatha Christie
Her books appear in 44 languages.
Q 11Which Charles Dickens novel of 1859 is often claimed as one of the best-selling novels ever?
A Tale of Two Cities
It is set in London and Paris during the French Revolution.
Q 12Which Chinese title, the 'Little Red Book', has print estimates of up to 6.5 billion?
Quotations from Chairman Mao
Over a billion volumes were printed from 1966 to 1969 alone.
Q 13What is the oldest extant printed book, dated 11 May 868?
The Diamond Sutra
It was found in the Dunhuang caves and is in the British Library.
Q 21How many copies had Western Europe's presses produced by 1500?
More than twenty million
Books from before 1500 are called incunabula.
Q 22What is a book printed in Europe before 1501 called?
An incunable
The Latin means 'swaddling clothes' or 'cradle'.
Q 23Which Venetian printer introduced italic type in 1501 and used a dolphin-and-anchor device?
Aldus Manutius
His motto was festina lente, 'make haste slowly'.
Q 24Which punctuation mark did the Venetian printer Manutius help standardise?
Q 14What unusual dedication appears in the colophon of the oldest printed book?
'For universal free distribution'
The first known explicit public-domain dedication.
Q 15Who invented movable type around 1040 AD, using ceramic characters?
Bi Sheng
During China's Northern Song dynasty.
Q 16What is the oldest extant book printed with movable metal type, from Korea in 1377?
Jikji
From the Goryeo dynasty.
Q 17What was Johannes Gutenberg's trade before he developed the printing press around 1440?
Goldsmith
His metalworking skill helped him cast type.
Q 18In which city did Gutenberg print his Bible in the 1450s?
Mainz
The press spread to about 270 cities within decades.
Q 19How many lines per page give Gutenberg's Bible its alternative name?
42
Also called the Mazarin Bible or B42.
Q 20How many Gutenberg Bibles survive in substantial portion?
49
Twenty-one are complete; none has been sold since 1978.
The semicolon
Along with the comma.
Q 25What was the first title printed in British North America, in 1640?
The Bay Psalm Book
A copy sold for $14.2 million in 2013.
Q 26How much did a Bay Psalm Book fetch at auction in 2013, a record for a printed volume?
$14.2m
One of eleven surviving first-edition copies.
Q 27Who bought Leonardo da Vinci's Codex Leicester for $30.8m in 1994?
Bill Gates
It was then the most expensive manuscript ever sold.
Q 28What is the main topic of the Codex Leicester?
The movement of water
Written in Leonardo's mirror script.
Q 29In what undeciphered script is the Voynich manuscript written?
'Voynichese'
Its vellum dates from 1404 to 1438.
Q 30Where has the Voynich manuscript been held since 1969?
Yale's Beinecke Library
Catalogued as MS 408.