1. On July 30, 1935, this company published the first paperback book ( Ariel by André Maurois). In the 82 years since its inception the company and its eponymous logo instantly bring joy to avid readers. The iconic logo was first sketched by Edward Young, a 21-year-old office junior who was dispatched to the nearest place where he could find a ‘dignified but flippant’ representative of its kind. Currently with a slimmer logo and an orange background, which publishing house is this?
2. ‘Bibliosmia’ happens because of hundreds of volatile organic compounds: acetic acid, butanol, furfural, octanal, methoxyphenyloxime, and other chemicals with funny-sounding names. Hints of almond are created by benzaldehyde, while vanillin emits notes of vanilla. Sweet smells come from toluene and ethyl benzene, and 2-ethyl hexanol produces a light floral fragrance. What is Bibliosmia?
3. Samuel Clemens purchased his Remington typewriter in 1874 for a then princely sum of $125. He tried to get rid of it as he thought it corrupted his morals, because it made him want to swear, but eventually laboured on. Two years later, his most famous work was published. He released it under a pseudonym which refers to the second mark on the line that measured safe depth (12 ft) for a steamboat. Though it’s not conclusively proven, this is supposed to be the first ever novel written on a typewriter. What is it called?
4. Jubayl is a city in modern day Lebanon on the coast of the Mediterranean sea. Around 330 BC they had established firm control over the trade of a particular wetland plant belonging to the family Cyperaceae. So much so, in fact, that the Greeks (the main users of the product) used the Greek name for the city, ‘Byblos’ to get ‘biblion’, from which we get both our words “Book” and “Bible.” What plant was this that led to us calling our treasured possessions after this ancient city?
5. The word ‘volume’ means a part of a sequence of books which comes from the Latin word ‘volumen’, which describes a particular action. ‘Volumen’ was also the name for scrolls in Latin. This action was necessary to get to the content inside the scrolls. Interestingly it’s the same action you would do to adjust the volume control in classic amplifiers. What action does ‘Volumen’ mean?
6. In Japanese doku means “to read”. Voracious readers, the Japanese have words like tsūdoku (read through) and jukudoku (reading deeply) which are in praise of sitting down with a book. Oku means to do something and leave it for a while, and tsunde means to stack things. So, what particular issue (which the quizmaster suffers from) is ‘tsundoku’?
7. The Dewey Decimal System (DDS) is a library classification system which introduced the concepts of relative location and relative index, which allows new books to be added to a library in their appropriate location based on subject. It uses a three-digit numeral system with fractional decimals. The number makes it possible to find any book and to return it to its proper place on the library shelves. Having written more than 500 books and 90,000 letters, which Science Fiction literary great is the only writer in the world to have books published in nine of the 10 categories in the DDS?
8. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes, Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan, De Profundis by Oscar Wilde, and The Prince by Machiavelli are all iconic works of literature. They are all richly-detailed and intense. What particular situation, in which all these authors had involuntarily found themselves, is suspected to have aided them in during the writing?
9. Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought is a book by Douglas Hofstadter exploring the mechanisms of intelligence through computer modelling. John Wainwright was a computer scientist working at Kaleida Labs, a joint online venture between Apple and IBM, back in 1995 and he wanted this book. What did he become the first to do that heralded the first major revolution in book sales in thousands of years?
10. Sting wrote the song ‘Every Breath You Take’ at the same desk at which this author used to write his novels. This was in a villa on the island of Jamaica. The author was a keen bird watcher and even named his primary protagonist after an ornithologist who wrote the definitive book on the subject of Caribbean birds called Birds of the West Indies in 1936. Even today the villa is available for rent, under the name the author gave it—’Goldeneye’—named after an intelligence operation he had overseen as a Naval Intelligence officer. Who is the author and what was the name of the ornithologist?
Answers
1. Penguin books
2. The smell of old books
3. Tom Sawyer
4. Papyrus
5. Because you had to roll out the scroll to read it
6. Tsundoku — acquiring books but letting them pile up in one’s home without reading them
7. Isaac Asimov
8. All these were either penned or conceived when the authors were imprisoned
9. The first book bought on Amazon
10. Ian Fleming, James Bond
A molecular biologist from Madurai, our quizmaster enjoys trivia and music, and is working on a rock ballad called ‘Coffee is a Drink, Kaapi is an Emotion’. @bertyashley
