Library of Congress Trivia
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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 01The Library of Congress's founding act moved the capital from which city?
Philadelphia
Philadelphia. There Congress had leaned on a city library, so the act that sent it to Washington gave it $5,000 to buy books of its own.
Q 02Before Thomas Jefferson's books rebuilt the Library of Congress, which president signed the 1800 act creating it?
John Adams
John Adams. He signed the act in April 1800, yet the library treats Thomas Jefferson as its principal founder and named a building for Adams only in 1980.
Q 03The Library of Congress's first 740 books were ordered in 1800 from booksellers in which city?
London
London. Booksellers Cadell & Davies shipped the 740 volumes and three maps across the Atlantic in hair trunks, and they were shelved in a room of the new Capitol.
Q 04Which Founding Father wrote the 1783 report urging Congress to buy a library of its own, a plan it never adopted?
James Madison
James Madison. He compiled the shopping list himself, some 550 titles in about 1,300 volumes, seventeen years before Congress finally voted money for books.
Q 05The Library of Congress lost its original collection when the Capitol burned during which war?
The War of 1812
The War of 1812. British troops burned the Capitol in August 1814 with the 3,000-volume library inside, and within weeks Jefferson offered Congress his own books to start again.
Q 06The Capitol and the Library of Congress were burned partly to avenge American troops torching the parliament of which modern Canadian city?
Toronto
Toronto. It was the town of York when Americans burned its parliament in 1813, and a British admiral on the return raid kept a Treasury account book from the Capitol as his souvenir.
Q 07Thomas Jefferson's 6,487 books, bought by Congress in 1815, reached Washington by wagon from which Virginia estate?
Monticello
Monticello. Ten wagons hauled the books north in the pine cases that had shelved them, and Jefferson put most of the payment toward his debts.
Q 08Which great orator, then a New Hampshire congressman, voted against buying Jefferson's library in 1815?
Daniel Webster
Daniel Webster. He sided with Federalists who called the price exorbitant and the books too literary, too foreign and irreligious, and the purchase barely passed the House.
Q 09Jefferson organised his books into Memory, Reason and Imagination, following whose scheme of knowledge?
Francis Bacon
Francis Bacon. Jefferson kept his portrait beside Newton's and Locke's and called the three his trinity of the greatest men the world had ever produced.
Q 10The worst fire in the Library of Congress's history, in 1851, broke out on the eve of which holiday?
Christmas
Christmas. The blaze took about 35,000 volumes, nearly two-thirds of Jefferson's books among them, and Congress voted money within months to replace what had burned.
Q 11Whose librarian, Charles Coffin Jewett, tried in the 1850s to make his employer the national library?
The Smithsonian
The Smithsonian. Its secretary Joseph Henry wanted a home for scientific research, so he fired Jewett in 1854 and later sent the Smithsonian's 40,000 volumes to the Library of Congress.
Q 12Physician John G. Stephenson, Librarian of Congress from 1861, left his desk to serve as a volunteer aide at which 1863 battle?
Gettysburg
Gettysburg. He was commended for his service there, and he could be away because the assistant he had hired was already running the library for him.
Q 13Which president appointed Ainsworth Spofford, the former bookseller who ran the Library of Congress from 1864 to 1897?
Abraham Lincoln
Q 21The Vollbehr collection, bought for the Library of Congress in 1930, included a rare complete vellum copy of what?
The Gutenberg Bible
The Gutenberg Bible. Congress voted $1.5 million for the collection months after the Wall Street crash, at the urging of a Mississippi congressman.
Q 22Gertrude Clarke Whittall gave the Library of Congress five instruments by which Italian maker?
Stradivari
Stradivari. Her gift was three violins, a viola and a cello, and she paid for concerts too, so that the instruments would be played.
Q 23Which arm of the Library of Congress, founded in 1914, gives lawmakers nonpartisan policy analysis?
The Congressional Research Service
Abraham Lincoln. He promoted Spofford on the last day of 1864, and over the next 32 years the onetime Cincinnati bookseller turned a shelf for lawmakers into a national library.
Q 14An 1870 law made the Library of Congress the one place where Americans register what?
Copyrights
Copyrights. Every claim brought two free copies of the book, map or song, and the flood of deposits forced Congress to give the library a building of its own.
Q 15In 1876 the Library of Congress was tied as the nation's largest with which city's public library?
Boston
Boston. A federal survey of 1876 ranked the two side by side, but the Library of Congress then grew so fast that it had to leave the Capitol for a building of its own.
Q 16Which Roman goddess appears in Elihu Vedder's marble mosaic on a staircase landing in the Library of Congress's Jefferson Building?
Minerva
Minerva. She is shown as the Minerva of Peace, helmet and shield laid on the ground, yet she keeps hold of her spear to show that her guard never drops.
Q 17The Library of Congress's prize for popular song, first given to Paul Simon in 2007, is named for which songwriting brothers?
The Gershwins
The Gershwins. George and Ira's papers and manuscripts are kept at the library, which is why it put the brothers' name on the prize it created in 2007.
Q 18Under Herbert Putnam, the Library of Congress began selling what to libraries around the world in 1901?
Printed catalog cards
Printed catalog cards. Putnam, appointed by President McKinley, stayed 40 years, the longest term of any Librarian of Congress, and also began lending its books to other libraries.
Q 19In 1901 the Library of Congress became the first American library to hold how many volumes?
1 million
1 million. A century earlier its whole collection had been 740 volumes, housed in the new Capitol.
Q 20Which president's 1903 order moved the Founding Fathers' papers from the State Department to the Library of Congress?
Theodore Roosevelt
Theodore Roosevelt. The Librarian of Congress, a friend of his, talked him into the order, which sent over the papers of Washington, Jefferson, Franklin and others.
The Congressional Research Service. For decades its reports went to Congress alone, until a 2018 law made the library publish them online for everyone.
Q 24Which poet did FDR appoint Librarian of Congress in 1939?
Archibald MacLeish
Archibald MacLeish. He used the post to urge librarians and writers to defend democracy against totalitarianism, then left in 1944 to become an Assistant Secretary of State.
Q 25Where were the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution stored during World War II?
Fort Knox
Fort Knox. The Library of Congress, then their keeper, sent them by train with armed Secret Service agents weeks after Pearl Harbor, and they stayed in the gold vault until 1944.
Q 26After World War II, a Library of Congress mission helped set up the national parliamentary library of which country?
Japan
Japan. The National Diet Library opened in 1948, months after the American advisers came, to give Japan's lawmakers a library of the kind Congress had.
Q 27In 2010 the Library of Congress announced it would archive every public post from which social network?
Twitter. The company handed over every public tweet since 2006, but the flood grew so large that from 2018 the library kept only a selection.
Q 28Which historian did Gerald Ford nominate as Librarian of Congress in 1975?
Daniel J. Boorstin
Daniel J. Boorstin. The Pulitzer-winning author of The Discoverers founded the library's Center for the Book to promote reading and saw it expand into a third building on Capitol Hill.
Q 29Which poet served as the Library of Congress's Consultant in Poetry in 1958, the post now called Poet Laureate?
Robert Frost
Robert Frost. He held the Washington post for a year in his eighties, and in 1961 he was back in the capital to read a poem at John F. Kennedy's inauguration.
Q 30Before the web, the Library of Congress sent its American Memory collections to schools on what?
CD-ROMs
CD-ROMs. The pilot began in 1990, and once the web took hold a few years later the library dropped the discs and put the collections online instead.