This library trivia quiz has 70 free questions with answers and walks through the whole story of libraries: the clay tablets of Ashurbanipal and the lost Library of Alexandria, the Bodleian, the Vatican, Trinity College's Long Room and the world's largest national libraries today. You will meet the surprising people who worked the desks (Casanova, Mao Zedong, Philip Larkin, J. Edgar Hoover), the systems that keep the shelves in order (Dewey Decimal, ISBN, MARC) and the records, from a 288-year-overdue book to George Washington's unreturned loan. There are pop-culture rounds too: the ghost in the New York Public Library reading room, Giles at Sunnydale High, Mrs Phelps in Matilda and the detention library of The Breakfast Club. It suits a quiet solo round, a bookish family game or a ready-made round for pub quiz hosts, teachers and library staff running Banned Books Week or National Library Week events. Every answer has been checked against a primary source, and each question shows where it came from, so you can settle disputes on the spot.
30 of 70 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which system, first published in 1876, sorts library books into ten main classes?
Dewey Decimal Classification
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.
Q 02In the Dewey Decimal system, which subject occupies the 800s?
Literature
Religion sits in the 200s, pure science in the 500s and history and geography close out the scheme in the 900s.
Q 03The Library of Alexandria was part of a larger institution dedicated to the Muses. What was it called?
Mouseion
The word survives in English as 'museum'; the Serapeum was a separate temple in the city that later held an offshoot collection.
Q 04Whose 6,487 books did the US buy in 1815 for $23,950 to restock its national library after the Capitol burned?
Thomas Jefferson
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.
Q 05J. Edgar Hoover took his first job at 18 as an entry-level messenger at which institution?
Library of Congress
Hoover later credited the job with teaching him the value of collating material, a habit that shaped the FBI's vast filing systems.
Q 06Which post did Carla Hayden become the first woman and the first African American to hold in 2016?
Librarian of Congress
The office dates back to 1802, and its holder also oversees the United States Copyright Office.
Q 07Sir Thomas Bodley refounded the main research library of which university in 1602?
Oxford
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.
Q 08Duke Humfrey's, the Bodleian's oldest reading room, stood in for which fictional location?
The Hogwarts library
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.
Q 09Which illuminated gospel manuscript is the most famous treasure of Trinity College Dublin's Old Library?
Book of Kells
It shares the building with the 15th-century Brian Boru harp, the oldest of its kind in Ireland.
Q 10The Jedi Archives in Episode II are said to resemble the 65-metre Long Room of which library?
Trinity College Dublin
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.
Q 11Which pope formally established the Vatican Library by papal bull on 15 June 1475?
Sixtus IV
The same pope gave his name to the Sistine Chapel; the library today holds about 75,000 codices and 1.1 million printed books.
Q 12The oldest known nearly complete manuscript of the Bible, Codex Vaticanus, is held by which institution?
Vatican Apostolic Library
The library admits anyone who can document their research needs and sees around 4,000 to 5,000 scholars a year.
Q 13Which New York mayor nicknamed the NYPL's marble lions Patience and Fortitude in the 1930s?
Fiorello La Guardia
Q 21Which US president borrowed The Law of Nations from the New York Society Library in 1789 and never returned it?
George Washington
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.
Q 22The record-overdue library book, 288 years, was borrowed in 1667-68 from Sidney Sussex College at which university?
Cambridge
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.
Q 23Melvil Dewey opened the world's first library school in January 1887 at which university?
Columbia
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.
Q 14Before the 1930s, what were the NYPL lions' original names, honouring two of the library's founders?
Leo Astor and Leo Lenox
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.
Q 15The 1984 film Ghostbusters opens with a ghost terrorising the main reading room of which institution?
New York Public Library
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.
Q 16The Royal Library of Ashurbanipal, over 30,000 clay tablets, was found at which ancient Assyrian capital?
Nineveh
Austen Henry Layard is credited with the discovery, and most of the tablets were taken to England, where they remain in a London museum.
Q 17Which famous ancient poem was among the holdings of Ashurbanipal's 7th-century BC library?
Epic of Gilgamesh
Ashurbanipal was the last great king of the Assyrian Empire, and the majority of his tablets survive only in badly fragmented form.
Q 18How many Carnegie libraries were built worldwide between 1883 and 1929?
2,509
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.
Q 19Andrew Carnegie's first public library opened in 1883 in his birthplace, in which country?
Scotland
Dunfermline got the first one; Carnegie also pioneered open shelves so readers could fetch their own books, which cut staffing costs.
Q 20Which pioneering subscription institution, America's first of its kind, did Franklin and his Junto found in 1731?
The Library Company
It effectively served as the national legislature's library until the federal capital moved in 1800.
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.
Q 24Melvil Dewey's simplified-spelling zeal led him to briefly spell his surname how?
Dui
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.
Q 25Casanova spent his final years as librarian at the Castle of Dux, in which historic region?
Bohemia
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.
Q 26Young Mao Zedong worked as an assistant to librarian Li Dazhao at which institution?
Peking University
Li Dazhao's essays on the Russian Revolution helped introduce Marxism to Chinese circles, and he went on to become an early Chinese Communist.
Q 27Which annual reading event did Laura Bush launch in 2001 with the federal library on Capitol Hill?
National Book Festival
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.
Q 28Banned Books Week, first held in 1982, takes place during the last full week of which month?
September
The picture book And Tango Makes Three, about two male penguins raising a chick, has repeatedly topped the most-challenged lists it highlights.
Q 29Which First Amendment and library activist founded Banned Books Week in 1982?
Judith Krug
The Association of American Publishers brought her the idea and she ran with it through the American Library Association's intellectual freedom office.
Q 30How many digits does an ISBN assigned on or after 1 January 2007 have?
13
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.