Johannes Gutenberg Trivia
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44 free Johannes Gutenberg trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This Johannes Gutenberg trivia quiz covers the Mainz patrician's son who could never inherit his father's place at the mint and instead invented the movable-type printing press. It follows the mysterious Strasbourg years, the failed scheme to sell holy mirrors to pilgrims, the loans from moneylender Johann Fust, the indulgences and Latin grammars that paid the bills, the 42-line Bible of 1455, the lawsuit that cost him his workshop, the archbishop's late pension, and the modern debate over exactly how his type was cast. The easy questions are ones most people know: what he invented, where he worked, what his famous book was. The medium ones ask about his family, his backers, his ink and alloy, the price of a Bible and how many copies survive. The hard ones dig into Peter Schoffer, the Mainz Psalter, the Bamberg 36-line Bible, Laurens Coster, the sand-mould hypothesis and the 1978 sale price. It suits a book-history round, a media-studies class or anyone who has ever downloaded a free ebook from the project that bears his name. Every answer has been checked against a reference encyclopaedia, and each question shows its explanation and citation once you have answered.
30 of 44 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which reformer's 1517 challenge to the Church did Gutenberg's invention spread through the German lands within weeks?
Martin Luther
Martin Luther. He had raised his Ninety-five Theses as points for scholars to debate, but printers in Nuremberg, Leipzig and Basel reissued them, and soon they were the talk of the German lands.
Q 02Which metalworking craft is Gutenberg usually said to have practised before he turned to printing?
Goldsmithing
Goldsmithing. He was attached to a goldsmiths' guild and taught gem polishing, and cutting steel punches to cast metal was exactly the skill that making type demanded.
Q 03The Gutenberg Bible is sometimes named after which French cardinal, in whose Paris library a copy was identified?
Mazarin
Mazarin. He had been dead a century: the copy in the library he founded was the first that bibliographers described, in a Paris bookseller's catalogue of 1763, and the name stuck.
Q 04What three metals made up Gutenberg's type-metal alloy?
Lead, tin and antimony
Lead, tin and antimony. The mix melts at a low heat and casts cleanly, while the tin and antimony make soft lead hard enough to survive thousands of pulls of the press.
Q 05What kind of ink did Gutenberg introduce for printing books?
Oil-based ink
Oil-based ink. The watery ink that scribes used simply ran off metal type, so Gutenberg made something closer to a varnish, sticky enough to cling and still glossy on the page today.
Q 06Why do reference books usually give 1400 as the year of Gutenberg's birth?
It is a convenient round guess
It is a convenient round guess. No record of his birth survives and estimates run from 1393 to 1406, but the round number let Mainz celebrate his 500th birthday in 1900.
Q 07On which feast day is Gutenberg traditionally said to have been born?
Saint John the Baptist, 24 June
Saint John the Baptist, 24 June. Children were often named for the saint of their birthday, though Johannes was too common a name to prove it; Mainz holds its Gutenberg festival, the Johannisnacht, around that date.
Q 08What are books printed in the half-century after Gutenberg's Bible, before 1501, called?
Incunabula
Incunabula. The word is Latin for swaddling clothes or a cradle, since these are books from the infancy of printing; the cut-off at 1500 is only a cataloguer's convenience.
Q 09The oldest surviving book printed with movable metal type, 78 years before Gutenberg's Bible, comes from which country?
Korea
Korea. The Buddhist text called Jikji was printed at a temple in 1377; its one surviving volume left the country in a French diplomat's collection and is now in France's national library.
Q 10What was added by hand to copies of the Gutenberg Bible after the text had been printed?
Coloured initials
Coloured initials. Gutenberg left gaps for them and for red headings, and a rubricator and an illuminator filled them in for each buyer, just as in a handwritten Bible.
Q 11In which city, now in France, did Gutenberg spend about ten years working on a secret invention?
Strasbourg
Strasbourg. Almost everything known of those years comes from a lawsuit, in which witnesses spoke of partners sworn to keep a new craft secret and of a carpenter who had built a press.
Q 12What was Gutenberg taken to court over in 1436-37?
A broken promise of marriage
A broken promise of marriage. The woman was named Ennelin and no verdict survives; lawsuits like this one are almost the only record of his life, since he never put his name on a book.
Q 13What did Gutenberg plan to sell to pilgrims travelling to Aachen in 1439?
Polished metal mirrors
Q 21Of which Latin text is the Gutenberg Bible an edition?
The Vulgate
The Vulgate, the translation St Jerome made in the 4th century. Gutenberg printed it in two columns with no page numbers, presumably so that it looked like the manuscripts his buyers knew.
Q 22From which country was the paper for Gutenberg's Bible imported?
Italy
Italy. Watermarks of an ox head and a bunch of grapes trace the sheets to mills at Caselle in Piedmont, one of the great papermaking centres of the day.
Q 23The Gutenberg Bible's typeface copies which style of medieval handwriting?
Gothic blackletter
Gothic blackletter. To pass for a scribe's best work the type needed some 290 different characters, with joined letters and abbreviations as well as the plain alphabet.
Polished metal mirrors. Pilgrims held them up to catch the power of Aachen's relics and carry it home, but the pilgrimage was put off for a year and the partners' money was tied up.
Q 14In which German city were sample pages of Gutenberg's Bible shown to prospective buyers in the autumn of 1454?
Frankfurt
Frankfurt. An imperial diet had drawn visitors from across Europe, the ideal audience for a book meant to sell far beyond Mainz; today the city hosts the world's largest book fair.
Q 15Which Mainz financier lent Gutenberg 800 guilders around 1450 and a further 800 for the Bible?
Johann Fust
Johann Fust. When the loans went unpaid he sued in 1455 for 2,026 guilders with interest, won, and went on to run the first printing firm that made real money.
Q 16Which former Paris scribe worked for Gutenberg and later married his financial backer's daughter?
Peter Schoffer
Peter Schoffer. Gutenberg's own workman testified for the backer in the lawsuit that ended the partnership, then ran the printing shop with him and outlasted them both by decades.
Q 17What lucrative church documents did Gutenberg's press print by the thousand in 1454-55?
Indulgences
Indulgences. Sold to pay for the defence of Cyprus against the Turks, they were forms with a blank for the buyer's name, and one of them is the earliest piece of his printing that can be firmly dated.
Q 18What does the Gutenberg Bible's nickname 'B42' count?
Lines per column
Lines per column. The first pages printed had only 40, and Gutenberg is thought to have filed down his type to squeeze in two more and save paper.
Q 19Roughly how many copies of the Gutenberg Bible were printed?
About 180
About 180. A visitor in 1455 heard figures of 158 and 180, and studies of the paper stock back the higher one; Gutenberg had raised the print run once work was under way.
Q 20Enea Silvio Piccolomini, who wrote in 1455 that Gutenberg's Bible could be read without glasses, later became what?
Pope
Pope, as Pius II, three years later. His letter to a cardinal is the earliest eyewitness report of the Bible and the firmest evidence for when it was printed.
Q 24Which 1457 book, printed by Gutenberg's former partners, was Europe's first to carry its printers' names and a date?
The Mainz Psalter
The Mainz Psalter. Its closing note boasts that the book was made 'without use of a pen' and names both men, but not the inventor whose type they were using.
Q 25What became of Gutenberg's grave in Mainz?
It was lost with its church
It was lost with its church. He was buried among the Franciscans, their church was pulled down in the 18th century, and only a relative's note printed in 1499 records that he lay there.
Q 26What is true of every known portrait of Gutenberg?
All were imagined after his death
All were imagined after his death. The first appeared in a book of famous Germans about a century later, and nothing reliable is recorded of how he really looked.
Q 27Who brought Gutenberg's invention to England, setting up a press at Westminster in 1476?
William Caxton
William Caxton. A merchant who learned the craft in Cologne, he printed mostly in his own language, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales included, and so helped to fix written English.
Q 28What did a 2001 computer study of Gutenberg's early type find about copies of each letter?
Too varied for one mould
Too varied for one mould. The study argued that each piece may have been cast in a temporary mould of sand, so the reusable mould long credited to Gutenberg perhaps came later; not all scholars agree.
Q 29Which encyclopedia's 1911 edition credited the Dutchman Laurens Coster, rather than Gutenberg, with inventing printing?
Encyclopaedia Britannica
Encyclopaedia Britannica. Its typography article held that printing began in Haarlem in the 1440s, on the strength of a tale first printed in 1588; later editions handed the honour back to Gutenberg.
Q 30In which country was movable type first invented, about four centuries before Gutenberg?
China
China. Around the 1040s an artisan named Bi Sheng made type from baked clay, but it never displaced woodblocks there, probably because a script of thousands of characters needed so many pieces.