50 free Library of Congress trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Library of Congress trivia starts with $5,000 and 740 books ordered from London in 1800 and ends with roughly 173 million items on 838 miles of shelving, three buildings on Capitol Hill, a Cold War bunker in Virginia full of film, and 15,000 new items arriving every working day. In between it burned twice, was rebuilt on Thomas Jefferson's personal library, and spent a century arguing about whether it belonged to Congress or to the nation. This quiz covers John Adams's founding act, the 1814 burning and the account book stolen by Admiral Cockburn, Jefferson's 6,487 books and Daniel Webster's objections, the Christmas Eve fire of 1851, the Smithsonian's abandoned bid to be the national library, Ainsworth Rand Spofford and copyright deposit, the Jefferson Building of 1897, Herbert Putnam's classification system and 'library of last resort', the Vollbehr Gutenberg Bible, Archibald MacLeish and the wartime move to Fort Knox, the Congressional Research Service, Boorstin and Billington, American Memory, THOMAS and Congress.gov, the National Book Festival, the Kluge Prize, Carla Hayden's firsts and her 2025 firing, and the Packard Campus in Culpeper. Easy questions suit anyone who has toured the Great Hall; the expert tier assumes you know which president's papers Theodore Roosevelt moved there by executive order. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's article on the Library of Congress, and the supporting sentence is attached to each question.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which year was the Library of Congress founded?
1800
It is the oldest federal cultural institution in the United States.
Q 02Which president signed the act of Congress that established the library on 24 April of its founding year?
John Adams
It appropriated $5,000 for books and 'a suitable apartment for containing them'.
Q 03How many books made up the library's first collection, ordered from London?
740
There were also three maps, all housed in the new Capitol.
Q 04Which Founding Father first proposed a congressional library in 1783 but failed to win support?
James Madison
The library's third building, opened in 1980, is now his official memorial.
Q 05Who destroyed much of the original collection in August 1814?
British forces burning Washington
More than 3,000 volumes in the Senate wing of the Capitol were lost.
Q 06What single volume did Admiral Cockburn take from the 1814 fire, returned by his family in 1940?
A government account book from 1810
It had sat in British hands for 126 years.
Q 07How many books did Congress buy from Thomas Jefferson in 1815 to rebuild the library?
6,487
The price was $23,950; the purchase doubled the library's size and broadened it beyond legislative subjects.
Q 08Which New Hampshire congressman opposed buying Jefferson's library over books of 'atheistical, irreligious' tendency?
Daniel Webster
Jefferson replied that there was no subject a member of Congress might not need to consult.
Q 09Jefferson organised his books into Memory, Reason and Imagination, following whose scheme of knowledge?
Francis Bacon
The library used his 44 subdivisions until a later librarian introduced the Library of Congress Classification.
Q 10On which date did the largest fire in the library's history destroy 35,000 books?
24 December 1851
It took two-thirds of the collection, including two-thirds of Jefferson's books; replacements for all but 300 had been found by 2008.
Q 11Whose librarian, Charles Coffin Jewett, tried in the 1850s to make his employer the national library?
The Smithsonian
Secretary Joseph Henry sacked him and later transferred 40,000 non-scientific volumes to the Library of Congress in 1866.
Q 12Which Lincoln-appointed librarian of Congress spent much of his term as an army physician at Gettysburg?
John G. Stephenson
His most important act may have been hiring Spofford as his assistant to run the place.
Q 13Which librarian, in office from 1865 for more than three decades, built the library into a national institution and won it copyright deposit?
Ainsworth Rand Spofford
Q 21The Otto Vollbehr collection, bought in 1929, included one of three perfect vellum copies of what?
The Gutenberg Bible
The library's copy came from the Saint Blaise Abbey in the Black Forest.
Q 22How many Stradivarius violins did Gertrude Clarke Whittall donate to the library?
Five
Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge paid for a concert hall inside the building.
Q 23Founded in 1914 to answer lawmakers' questions, what is the library's policy-analysis arm for Congress called?
The Congressional Research Service
The Legislative Reorganization Act of 1970 refocused the library on research for Congress.
By the time it moved out of the Capitol the library held more than 840,000 volumes, 40 percent of them from copyright deposit.
Q 14In which year did the library gain the right to two copies of every copyrightable work printed in the US?
1870
Thousands of new items now arrive every business day, though not all are kept.
Q 15In 1876 the Library of Congress was tied as the nation's largest with which city's public library?
Boston
Both held about 300,000 volumes at the time.
Q 16In which year did the library move out of the Capitol into what is now the Thomas Jefferson Building?
1897
Construction had begun in 1890 with granite from New England Granite Works.
Q 17Who was the first woman appointed to the library's staff, in 1893?
Elizabeth Dwyer
The reorganisation on moving into the new building then more than doubled the staff from 42 to 108.
Q 18Which librarian held the post for forty years from 1899 and introduced the interlibrary loan service?
Herbert Putnam
He called the Library of Congress a 'library of last resort' and devised its classification system.
Q 19In which year did the Library of Congress become the first US library to hold one million volumes?
1901
That was two years into a forty-year tenure.
Q 20Which president transferred the Founding Fathers' papers from the State Department to the library in 1903?
Theodore Roosevelt
Putnam also bought an 80,000-volume Russian library and the Romanovs' imperial collection.
Q 24Which poet, appointed by FDR, became the most widely known Librarian of Congress?
Archibald MacLeish
He set up a 'democracy alcove' for the Declaration and Constitution and resigned in 1944 to become Assistant Secretary of State.
Q 25Where were the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution stored during World War II?
Fort Knox
The library also researched Himalayan weather data for Air Force pilots.
Q 26Which librarian's postwar 'Library of Congress Missions' helped create Japan's National Diet Library?
Luther H. Evans
Another mission assisted the San Francisco meeting that founded the United Nations.
Q 27Which librarian called a proposal to rename the Library of Congress 'unspeakable violence to tradition'?
Lawrence Quincy Mumford
Harvard's Douglas Bryant had suggested emphasising the library's national over its legislative role.
Q 28Which historian, appointed by Gerald Ford in 1974, oversaw the move into the Madison Building?
Daniel J. Boorstin
By his retirement in 1987 the New York Times called the post 'perhaps the leading intellectual public position in the nation'.
Q 29Which Reagan-nominated Librarian of Congress doubled the collections to 160 million items?
James H. Billington
He launched digitisation, the online legislative archive, the National Book Festival and the Kluge Center.
Q 30What was the name of the library's first digitisation project, launched in 1990?
American Memory
It was first meant to distribute 160 million objects on LaserDiscs and CDs before the internet changed the plan.