Printing Press Trivia
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100 free Printing Press trivia questions with answers — technology quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Printing press trivia for history buffs, book lovers, students and pub-quiz setters. The quiz starts long before Gutenberg, with Bi Sheng's baked-clay type in Song-dynasty China and the Korean Jikji of 1377, then follows the goldsmith from Mainz through his mirror-selling misadventure, the loans from Johann Fust, the 42-line Bible and the lawsuit that cost him his workshop. From there it tracks the press across the world - Caxton at Westminster, the first presses in Mexico City and Goa, the Ottoman press of Ibrahim Muteferrika - and into the industrial age of Lord Stanhope's iron press, Koenig's steam machines at The Times, Hoe's rotary press and the hot-metal Linotype and Monotype. There are questions on how a hand press actually worked (frisket, rounce, ink balls), what the Gutenberg Bible cost and how many survive, the friars who thought printing was a menace, and what economists have measured about cities that got presses early. Roughly a third of the questions are easy, a third medium and the rest are for people who know their incunabula. Every answer has been checked against a reference page and each question shows its source once you have answered.
30 of 100 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which German city did Johannes Gutenberg set up the workshop where he printed his famous Bible?
Mainz
It was his home town, a wealthy Rhine city; the Gutenberg Museum was founded there in 1900 for the 500th anniversary of his birth.
Q 02Around what year did Gutenberg develop his movable-type printing press?
1440
He combined four technologies that had matured by the mid-15th century: the screw press, movable type, the bound-book format and mechanised paper-making.
Q 03What was Gutenberg's trade before he turned to printing?
Goldsmith
His knowledge of metals let him devise a durable type alloy and a hand mould for casting letters quickly and in quantity.
Q 04Gutenberg's type metal was an alloy of lead, tin and which third metal?
Antimony
The mix melted at a low temperature for cheap, fast casting yet produced hard, durable letters.
Q 05Gutenberg's printing fluid, unlike the traditional water-mixed inks, was made with what base?
Oil
Water-based mixtures soaked the paper and would not stick to metal; the new formula was closer to a paint.
Q 06How many lines per page does the standard Gutenberg Bible have, giving it its nickname?
42
The first pages were set at 40 lines; the count was raised part-way through, presumably to save paper, by tightening the line spacing.
Q 07How much did a copy of the Gutenberg Bible sell for, equivalent to about three years' wages for a clerk?
30 florins
That was still far cheaper than a manuscript Bible, which could take a single scribe more than a year to copy.
Q 08Roughly how many Gutenberg Bibles are known to survive in at least substantial portion?
49
Only 21 are entirely complete, and many fragments survive because leaves were reused as stiffening in the bindings of later books.
Q 09What did the complete Gutenberg Bible sold at auction in 1978 fetch?
$2.4 million
That copy is now in Austin, Texas; as of 2025 no complete copy had come to market since, and one is estimated at $25-35 million.
Q 10Which moneylender financed Gutenberg's press with two 800-guilder loans, then sued him and won the Bible workshop?
Johann Fust
With 6% interest the debt had grown to 2,026 guilders by 1456; the archbishop's court found for the creditor and Gutenberg was effectively bankrupt.
Q 11Which former Paris scribe, later Fust's son-in-law, is thought to have designed some of Gutenberg's first typefaces?
Peter Schöffer
His shop with the financier was the first in Europe to issue a book carrying the printer's name and date, the Psalter of 1457.
Q 12Which future pope wrote in March 1455 that he had seen Gutenberg Bible pages in Frankfurt?
Pius II
His letter is the most reliable evidence for dating the Bible and cites reports of both 158 and 180 copies being printed.
Q 13Around 1439 Gutenberg lost money making metal mirrors for pilgrims to which city's relic exhibition?
Aachen
The mirrors were believed to capture holy light from the relics; a flood delayed the exhibition by a year and the capital could not be repaid.
Q 21Gutenberg modelled his machine on the screw press, which the Romans had used mainly for what?
Pressing grapes and olives
The same device was used in towns as a cloth press for printing patterns, and paper presses in German lands worked on the same principle.
Q 22Which book format, which had replaced the scroll by about AD 500, was one of the technologies Gutenberg combined?
The codex
It is more compact and cheaper than a scroll and, crucially, both sides of the page can be used.
Q 23Late-13th-century Italian paper mills cut paper's price to what fraction of parchment's cost?
One sixth
Q 14In which city was Gutenberg living when he is said to have perfected 'Aventur und Kunst'?
Strasbourg
He had relatives there on his mother's side and served in the city militia; a public square there is now named for him.
Q 15Gutenberg's 1465 title of Hofmann came with a stipend, a court outfit and tax-free allowances of what?
Grain and wine
The allowance was 2,180 litres of grain and 2,000 litres of wine a year; he died three years later and his grave is now lost.
Q 16Who invented the world's first movable-type system, in China around 1040?
Bi Sheng
His method was recorded by the scholar Shen Kuo, and later experiments showed his fired-clay type was 'as hard and tough as horn'.
Q 17The first movable type, made in Song-dynasty China in the 11th century, was formed from what material?
Baked clay
Wooden type was tried too but abandoned because the grain and uneven swelling after inking spoiled the impressions.
Q 18What is the name of the oldest surviving book printed with metal movable type, produced in Korea in 1377?
Jikji
It is a Buddhist text from the Goryeo era, printed 78 years before Gutenberg's Bible.
Q 19Around 1298 the Yuan official Wang Zhen carved more than 30,000 wooden types to print 100 copies of what?
A county gazetteer
The Records of Jingde County ran to more than 60,000 characters; he then wrote a treatise describing his revolving-table method.
Q 20Why did movable type see only limited use in China despite being invented there?
A logographic script needed thousands of separate characters
Gutenberg's Latin alphabet was a practical advantage: a compositor could set any text from a relatively small set of characters.
Water-powered paper mills, first securely documented in 1282, replaced the hand labour of Chinese and Muslim papermaking.
Q 24By 1500, printing had spread from a single German shop to roughly how many European cities?
About 270
By 1480 printers were already active in 110 places, and historians conclude the printed book was in universal use in Europe by then.
Q 25How many copies had Western Europe's presses produced by 1500?
More than 20 million
Output rose tenfold in the following century to an estimated 150 to 200 million copies.
Q 26Who became Europe's most published author in 1518 and 1519, with 45 works reprinted in 291 editions?
Martin Luther
Many were pamphlets of eight pages or fewer, cheap to print and quick to distribute; his tracts reached 300,000 copies in 1518-20.
Q 27What is the term for surviving books printed in Europe before 1501?
Incunabula
The word is Latin for 'swaddling clothes' or 'cradle', marking the infancy of printing.
Q 28Who built the first iron printing press by 1800, able to print a whole sheet in a single pull?
Lord Stanhope
A wooden frame could not have withstood the extra force; the machine doubled the old press's output to 480 pages an hour.
Q 29Which newspaper was first printed on Friedrich Koenig's steam-driven cylinder presses in 1814?
The Times
The machines ran at 1,100 sheets an hour; a further patent covered a perfecting press that printed both sides of a sheet in one pass.
Q 30Who invented the steam-powered rotary printing press in the United States in 1843?
Richard M. Hoe
His original design ran at up to 2,000 revolutions an hour, printing four page images per revolution for 8,000 pages an hour.