Reading Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
6correct to beat the crowd
110 free Reading trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
53 free reading trivia questions with answers. This is trivia about reading rather than about any one book: how the eye actually moves across a line, why silent reading once seemed remarkable, how Louis Braille built a tactile alphabet at fifteen, and what dyslexia is. It also covers the machinery that put words in front of readers: Chinese porcelain type, the Gutenberg Bible, the codex, sixpenny Penguins, the ISBN, the Kindle, and the audiobook. The rest is the culture of reading. Libraries from Alexandria to Carnegie's 1,689, the Dewey Decimal System, Jefferson's books rescuing Congress's collection, Reading Rainbow, Oprah's Book Club, Dolly Parton's Imagination Library, Little Free Libraries, Banned Books Week, and the Dr. Seuss books written from tiny word lists to kill off Dick and Jane. Fifty-three questions, roughly a third easy enough for a school library quiz, the rest for teachers, librarians and book-club regulars. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the people, institutions and inventions involved, and each question carries the sentence that supports it.
30 of 110 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01How many raised dots make up a full braille cell?
Six
That gives 64 possible combinations, counting the empty cell used as a word space.
Q 02How old was Louis Braille when he first presented his tactile reading code in 1824?
15
Louis Braille was 15 when he presented his dot code in 1824, having been blinded at three by an awl accident in his father's harness workshop; the system was published in 1829.
Q 03Braille's code was an improvement on 'night writing', a tactile system invented by whom?
Charles Barbier
Charles Barbier, a French army captain, devised a 12-dot system of 'night writing' meant to let soldiers pass messages silently in the dark; Braille met it at the Paris institute in 1821 and cut the cell down.
Q 04What term did Émile Javal coin for the short, rapid jumps the eyes make while reading?
Saccades
Saccades, from the French for 'jerks', was Émile Javal's 1879 term for the rapid jumps between fixations; contrary to earlier belief, the eyes do not glide smoothly along a line of text.
Q 05In his Confessions, Saint Augustine remarks on which bishop's then-unusual habit of reading silently?
Ambrose
Ambrose, bishop of Milan, read with his eyes while 'his voice and tongue were silent', Augustine wrote in Book VI; reading aloud was so much the norm that the habit seemed to need explaining.
Q 06Which teacher coined 'speed reading' and launched Reading Dynamics in Washington, D.C. in 1959?
Evelyn Wood
Evelyn Wood, a Utah schoolteacher, opened her Reading Dynamics institute in Washington in 1959 after noticing that sweeping her hand down the page helped her eyes move faster; the term 'speed reading' is credited to her.
Q 07Roughly how fast do people read normally for comprehension?
200–230 words per minute
Adults reading silently for comprehension average about 200–230 words per minute; a 2019 review of 190 studies put the mean at 238 for non-fiction, while skimming at 700 or more sacrifices understanding.
Q 08What is the name for loss of the ability to read after brain injury?
Alexia
Alexia, or acquired dyslexia, is the loss of reading ability after brain damage, usually a stroke in the left hemisphere; Jules Dejerine described 'pure alexia' without loss of writing in 1892.
Q 09What material did Bi Sheng use for the first movable type, around 1040?
Porcelain
Porcelain, or fired clay, is what Shen Kuo's Dream Pool Essays records Bi Sheng using, baking each cut character hard and setting it in an iron frame; the oldest surviving book printed with metal type is Korea's Jikji of 1377.
Q 10In which city did Johannes Gutenberg print his Bible in the 1450s?
Mainz
Gutenberg printed the Bible in Mainz, on the Rhine, around 1454–55; of the roughly 180 copies made, 49 survive in substantial part and 21 are complete.
Q 11How many lines per page give the Gutenberg Bible its other name?
42
It is called the 42-line Bible: the earliest pages were set at 40 lines, then 41, before 42 lines per column became standard, apparently to save paper and vellum.
Q 12Which Buddhist text, printed on 11 May 868, is considered the oldest dated printed book?
The Diamond Sutra
The Diamond Sutra scroll, a Chinese translation bearing the date 11 May 868, was found in the Dunhuang caves in 1900 by the Daoist monk Wang Yuanlu and bought by Aurel Stein in 1907; it is in the British Library.
Q 13What is the name for the paged book format that gradually replaced the scroll in the ancient world?
The codex
Q 21The first modern tax-supported public library, opened in 1833, was in which small New Hampshire town?
Peterborough
Peterborough, New Hampshire, voted in 1833 to fund a town library from tax money, a first for the United States; Boston's public library was authorised in 1848, and Andrew Carnegie later paid for 1,689 American libraries.
Q 22Which Roman accidentally burned part of the Library of Alexandria during his civil war in 48 BC?
Julius Caesar
Julius Caesar set fire to ships in the harbour in 48 BC while besieged in Alexandria, and the blaze spread to buildings including part of the library; ancient estimates of its holdings run from 40,000 to 700,000 scrolls.
Q 23The Book of Kells, an illuminated Gospel book from around 800 AD, is on display at which library?
The codex, pages bound along one edge, takes its name from Latin caudex, a tree trunk or wooden block; the poet Martial praised its convenience in the first century, and early Christians adopted it widely.
Q 14Before paper, the pages of early codices were typically parchment or vellum, made from what?
Animal hides
Parchment and vellum are animal hides — sheep, goat or calf skin — soaked in lime, scraped and stretched; vellum strictly means calfskin, and the word parchment comes from Pergamon in Asia Minor.
Q 15The first Penguin paperbacks of 1935 were sold through Woolworths for what price?
Sixpence
Penguins cost sixpence, the price of a packet of cigarettes; Allen Lane said the idea came from the dismal reading on sale at Exeter St Davids station, and a large Woolworths order rescued the launch.
Q 16Which German publisher's 1931 format, with colour-coded genre covers, did Penguin copy?
Albatross Books
The Second World War cut the Albatross experiment short, but its standard size and typographic covers lived on.
Q 17Melvil Dewey developed his decimal classification in 1873 while working at the library of which college?
Amherst
Dewey was a student assistant in the Amherst College library when he worked out the scheme in 1873; he published it anonymously in 1876, and by 2009 OCLC counted it in use in 200,000 libraries across 135 countries.
Q 18Whose 6,487 books did Congress buy to rebuild its library after the British burned Washington in 1814?
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson sold Congress his 6,487 volumes in 1815 for $23,950; a fire in 1851 destroyed about two-thirds of them, and the library's main building, opened in 1897, carries his name.
Q 19The Bodleian Library, founded in 1602, is the main research library of which university?
Oxford
The Bodleian is the University of Oxford's main research library, reopened by Sir Thomas Bodley in 1602 on the site of the medieval Duke Humfrey's Library; it is the UK's second-largest library after the British Library.
Q 20Which library, endowed by a merchant's will in 1653, is Britain's oldest free public reference library?
Chetham's Library
Chetham's Library in Manchester was endowed by the 1653 will of the merchant Humphrey Chetham as a free public library; Marx and Engels worked together at one of its reading desks in 1845.
Trinity College Dublin
Trinity College Dublin has held the Book of Kells since the 1660s and shows it in its Old Library, with two of its calf-vellum volumes open at a time; the manuscript was made by Columban monks, probably on Iona.
Q 24How many digits has an ISBN had since the standard changed in 2007?
13
An ISBN has 13 digits: the old ten-digit code with a 978 prefix and a recalculated check digit; the scheme grew out of a nine-digit Standard Book Number devised for WHSmith in 1965.
Q 25In which year did Amazon launch the first Kindle e-reader?
2007
The first Kindle went on sale on 19 November 2007 at $399 and sold out within hours; Amazon's Lab126 subsidiary developed it, and the larger-screened Kindle DX followed in 2009.
Q 26What was Amazon's internal codename for the original Kindle?
Fiona
The Kindle name itself came from branding consultants Michael Cronan and Karin Hibma, who liked that it means to light a fire.
Q 27UNESCO's World Book Day, 23 April, was fixed on the death date of which author?
Miguel de Cervantes
Miguel de Cervantes died in April 1616 and was buried on the 23rd, the date also given for Shakespeare's death; Spain first held its book day on 7 October 1926, his presumed birthday, moving it to 23 April in 1930.
Q 28On which date is International Literacy Day observed each year?
8 September
International Literacy Day is 8 September, proclaimed by UNESCO's General Conference in 1966 and first observed in 1967; the date recalls the opening of the 1965 Tehran conference of education ministers on eradicating illiteracy.
Q 29Which book has reportedly been translated into more languages than any other except the Bible?
The Little Prince
The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's 1943 tale, had appeared in some 600 languages and dialects by 2024; only the Bible, available in well over 3,000 languages, outstrips it.
Q 30Which seven-volume French novel holds the Guinness World Record for longest novel?
In Search of Lost Time
In Search of Lost Time runs to some 1.2 million words across seven volumes published from 1913 to 1927; Proust paid Grasset to issue the first, Swann's Way, after the NRF turned it down.