Library Trivia
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This library trivia quiz has 118 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 118 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
The Dewey Decimal Classification, devised by Melvil Dewey and first published in 1876, divides knowledge into ten main classes, each split into ten divisions and ten sections; by 2009 it was in use in some 200,000 libraries.
Q 02In the Dewey Decimal system, which subject occupies the 800s?
Literature
Literature and rhetoric fill the 800s of the Dewey Decimal Classification; religion sits in the 200s, pure science in the 500s and history and geography close the scheme in the 900s.
Q 03The Library of Alexandria formed part of which larger institution of scholars?
Mouseion
The Library of Alexandria belonged to the Mouseion, a Ptolemaic institution dedicated to the Muses whose name survives as 'museum'; the Serapeum was a separate temple that later housed a daughter 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
Thomas Jefferson sold Congress his 6,487-volume library in 1815 for $23,950 after the British burned the Capitol in 1814; his books on philosophy, science and cookery broadened a collection that had been mostly legal texts.
Q 05J. Edgar Hoover took his first job at 18 as an entry-level messenger at which institution?
Library of Congress
J. Edgar Hoover joined the Library of Congress in 1913 as an 18-year-old messenger while studying law at night; he later credited the job with teaching him the value of collating material, the habit behind the FBI's vast files.
Q 06Which post did Carla Hayden become the first woman and the first African American to hold in 2016?
Librarian of Congress
Carla Hayden was sworn in as the 14th Librarian of Congress in September 2016, the first woman and first African American in an office dating to 1802 whose holder also oversees the US Copyright Office.
Q 07Sir Thomas Bodley refounded the main research library of which university in 1602?
Oxford
Bodley reopened the University of Oxford's library in 1602; the Bodleian, as it became known, is one of six UK legal deposit libraries and requires readers to swear not to remove, mark or deface any volume.
Q 08Duke Humfrey's, the Bodleian's oldest reading room, stood in for which fictional location?
The Hogwarts library
Duke Humfrey's Library, the Bodleian's 15th-century reading room, appeared as the Hogwarts library in the early Harry Potter films, including the restricted-section scene in Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone.
Q 09Which illuminated gospel manuscript is the most famous treasure of Trinity College Dublin's Old Library?
Book of Kells
The Book of Kells, a lavishly illuminated Latin gospel book made around AD 800, has been at Trinity College Dublin since the 1660s and is displayed in the Old Library beside the 15th-century Brian Boru harp.
Q 10The Jedi Archives in Episode II are said to resemble the 65-metre Long Room of which library?
Trinity College Dublin
Trinity College Dublin's Long Room, 65 metres long and built between 1712 and 1732, bears a much-remarked resemblance to the Jedi Archives seen in 2002's Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones.
Q 11Which pope formally established the Vatican Library by papal bull on 15 June 1475?
Sixtus IV
Sixtus IV, the pope who also gave his name to the Sistine Chapel, founded the Vatican Library with the bull Ad decorem militantis Ecclesiae on 15 June 1475, building on Nicholas V's earlier collection.
Q 12Which New York mayor nicknamed the NYPL's marble lions Patience and Fortitude in the 1930s?
Fiorello La Guardia
Fiorello La Guardia, mayor from 1934 to 1945, named the lions Patience and Fortitude for the qualities he felt New Yorkers needed to survive the Great Depression; Patience sits to the south, Fortitude to the north.
Q 13Before the 1930s, what were the NYPL lions' original names, honouring two of the library's founders?
Q 21The record-overdue library book, 288 years, was borrowed in 1667-68 from Sidney Sussex College at which university?
Cambridge
Sidney Sussex is a Cambridge college; Colonel Robert Walpole, father of Britain's first prime minister, borrowed the book in 1667-68 and the historian J. H. Plumb found it at Houghton Hall in 1956, returning it without a fine.
Q 22Melvil Dewey opened the world's first library school in January 1887 at which university?
Columbia
Dewey's School of Library Economy opened at Columbia College in New York on 5 January 1887 with 20 students, 17 of them women; Columbia's trustees objected to the women and the school moved to Albany in 1889.
Q 23Melvil Dewey's simplified-spelling zeal led him to briefly spell his surname how?
Dui
Leo Astor and Leo Lenox
The lions were first called Leo Astor and Leo Lenox after John Jacob Astor and James Lenox, whose collections merged with the Tilden Trust to form the library in 1895; the building opened on 23 May 1911.
Q 14The 1984 film Ghostbusters opens with a ghost terrorising the main reading room of which institution?
New York Public Library
The ghost-librarian scene was shot in the New York Public Library's main branch at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street, though the basement stacks that follow were filmed at the Los Angeles Central Library.
Q 15The Royal Library of Ashurbanipal, over 30,000 clay tablets, was found at which ancient Assyrian capital?
Nineveh
The library was unearthed at Nineveh, near modern Mosul, by Austen Henry Layard and Hormuzd Rassam in the 1840s and 1850s; its roughly 30,000 tablets and fragments went to the British Museum.
Q 16Which famous ancient poem was among the holdings of Ashurbanipal's 7th-century BC library?
Epic of Gilgamesh
The Epic of Gilgamesh is best known from the twelve-tablet Standard Babylonian version recovered from Ashurbanipal's library at Nineveh; George Smith's 1872 reading of its flood tablet caused a sensation.
Q 17How many Carnegie libraries were built worldwide between 1883 and 1929?
2,509
Carnegie funded 2,509 libraries between 1883 and 1929: 1,689 in the United States, 660 in Britain and Ireland, 125 in Canada and the rest elsewhere, at a total cost of about $56 million.
Q 18Andrew Carnegie's first public library opened in 1883 in his birthplace, in which country?
Scotland
Carnegie's first library opened in 1883 in Dunfermline, Scotland, the town he left for America aged 12; he also championed open shelves so readers fetched their own books, which cut staffing costs.
Q 19Which pioneering subscription institution, America's first of its kind, did Franklin and his Junto found in 1731?
The Library Company
Franklin and his Junto founded the Library Company of Philadelphia in 1731 as America's first subscription library; it served as the de facto library of Congress while Philadelphia was the capital, until 1800.
Q 20Which US president borrowed The Law of Nations from the New York Society Library in 1789 and never returned it?
George Washington
George Washington borrowed Vattel's The Law of Nations on 5 October 1789; the library spotted the gap in a 2010 ledger inventory, waived the theoretical $300,000 fine, and Mount Vernon staff supplied a replacement copy of the same edition.
Dewey briefly signed himself 'Melvil Dui', having already trimmed 'Melville' to 'Melvil'; in 2019 the American Library Association removed his name from its Melvil Dewey Medal over his record of racism, antisemitism and sexual harassment.
Q 24Casanova spent his final years as librarian at the Castle of Dux, in which historic region?
Bohemia
Dux, now Duchcov in the Czech Republic, lies in Bohemia; Casanova served Count Waldstein there from 1785 until his death in 1798, and to relieve the boredom wrote his memoir Histoire de ma vie.
Q 25Young Mao Zedong worked as an assistant to librarian Li Dazhao at which institution?
Peking University
Mao worked as an assistant in the Peking University library from late 1918 under its head librarian Li Dazhao, whose essays on the Russian Revolution helped introduce Marxism to China; Li co-founded the Communist Party in 1921.
Q 26Which annual reading event did Laura Bush launch in 2001 with the federal library on Capitol Hill?
National Book Festival
Laura Bush and Librarian of Congress James Billington launched the National Book Festival on 8 September 2001; she had founded the Texas Book Festival in 1995 and holds a master's in library science from the University of Texas at Austin.
Q 27Banned Books Week, launched in 1982, was traditionally held in the last week of which month?
September
Banned Books Week traditionally ran in the last week of September from its 1982 launch; the picture book And Tango Makes Three, about two male penguins raising a chick, repeatedly topped the most-challenged lists it highlights.
Q 28Which First Amendment and library activist founded Banned Books Week in 1982?
Judith Krug
Judith Krug, director of the American Library Association's Office for Intellectual Freedom from 1967 until her death in 2009, launched Banned Books Week in 1982 after the Association of American Publishers brought her the idea.
Q 29How many digits does an ISBN assigned on or after 1 January 2007 have?
13
Since 1 January 2007 ISBNs have 13 digits, matching the EAN-13 barcode: the old ten-digit number is prefixed with 978, the 'Bookland' country code, and the check digit is recalculated.
Q 30The ISBN grew out of a book-numbering system devised in the mid-1960s for which UK retailer?
WHSmith
The Standard Book Number was devised in 1966 by statistics professor Gordon Foster for the retailer WHSmith, which wanted to computerise its warehouse; it became the international standard ISO 2108 in 1970.