Q 01/05

From which Old English word does 'book' come?

A) Liber

B) Buch

C) Boc

D) Biblos

Answer · why

C) Boc

'Book' descends from Old English 'boc', a Germanic word with cognates in Old Norse 'bok' and Old Saxon 'bok'; Latin 'liber' and Greek 'biblos' are unr...

Q 02/05

Roughly how many unique books had been published in total, by Google's 2010 estimate?

A) Around 13 million

B) Around 130 million

C) Around 30 million

D) Around 1.3 billion

Answer · why

B) Around 130 million

In August 2010 Google engineers estimated there were 129,864,880 unique books in the world, around 130 million, after de-duplicating library catalogue...

Q 03/05

What is the name of the format, of pages bound at one edge, that replaced the scroll?

A) The quire

B) The volumen

C) The folio

D) The codex

Answer · why

D) The codex

The codex, pages bound along one edge, replaced the scroll in the Roman world; it developed from hinged wax tablets and was adopted early by Christian...

Q 04/05

According to Guinness World Records, what is the best-selling book of all time?

A) Quotations from Chairman Mao

B) The Bible

C) Don Quixote

D) The Qur'an

Answer · why

B) The Bible

Guinness World Records names the Bible the best-selling book of all time, with an estimated five billion or more copies printed and distributed.

Q 05/05

Which novel opens with the sentence 'Call me Ishmael'?

A) Moby-Dick

B) The Old Man and the Sea

C) Treasure Island

D) Robinson Crusoe

Answer · why

A) Moby-Dick

Moby-Dick, Herman Melville's 1851 novel, opens with the three-word sentence 'Call me Ishmael', spoken by the sailor who narrates the hunt for the whit...