Picture this:
What novels do these pictures suggest?
1) The author of this book lost the use of his left hand at the Battle of Lepanto and was a slave in Algiers for five years. Soon after its publication, one critic wrote that the novel would circle the world "arse to arse" as toilet paper, but it has since been voted The Greatest Book of All Time by the Nobel Institute.
Answer:
2) This novel contains the only citation of the longest palindrome in the Oxford English Dictionary. The 12-letter "tattarrattat", meaning a "knock on a door", reads the same both forward and backwards. The author met his wife on June 16, a date so important to him that the events of this book all take place on that date. His wife didn't care much for her husband's writing and only ever read 27 pages of the book, much to his consternation.
Answer:
3)This was the breakthrough novel of a man who recently had five works in a survey of the UK's 100 favourite books. Although the writer denied it, it was suggested at the time that the characters were in fact the creations of the illustrator Robert Seymour, who committed suicide after artistic differences with the writer. Although Seymour left a note saying "Blame no one", his last illustrations for this novel, found posthumously, showed all the characters with their faces turned in towards walls.
Answer:
4) The author of this work was a spy and an MP, was once accused of rape (which he settled out of court), and was a diplomat, for which work he was awarded a daily pitcher of wine by Edward III. He was also the author of A Treatise on the Astrolabe, the oldest extant scientific handbook in the English language.
Answer:
5) This book was written in a debtors' prison and was banned for "corrupting the King's subjects" within a year of its publication. The Bishop of London attributed two earthquakes that hit the city in quick succession in 1750 as divine retribution for the publication of the book.
Answer:Biblioclasts:
6) The Mayans had the only fully developed writing system in pre-Columbian America. How many Mayan books exist today?
a) 0
b) 4
c) 13
d) About 15,000
7) In 1842 all the books written in which script were burnt?
a) Manx
b) Braille
c) Sioux
d) Esperanto
8) Where would you find a plaque declaring that: "Where books are burnt in the end people will burn?"
a) Bebelplatz, Berlin
b) The Vatican
c) Lord's Cricket Ground
d) On the door of Room 101 in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four
9) Which of the following were systematically burnt during a moral panic in 1950s America?
a) Copies of the Kama Sutra
b) Copies of On the Origin of Species
c) DIY manuals
d) Comic books
10) Why did the authorities in Kansas City, Missouri, intervene to prevent a public book-burning in May 2007?
a) Because it contravened the First Amendment guarantee of free speech
b) Because a last-minute Richard Dawkins-sponsored court order halted the burning of scientific texts
c) Because families of servicemen and women complained that an anti-war protest was unpatriotic
d) Health and safety
Wordplay:
11) What striking and unusual quality has this particular part of our quiz got in common with Gadsby, a book that first found its way into print back in 1939?
a) It's an epigram
b) It's a lipogram
c) It's an anagram
d) It's a stripogram
12) A book can definitely express fears, grief, hopes, ideas, joy, kindness, love, madness, nonsense, obsessions, poetry, questions, reasons, sadness, terrors, universal values, worries, xenophobia, yearning, zeal. But which of the following books emulates what we did in the preceding sentence?
a) Ant and Bee
b) Alphabet Soup
c) Alphabetical Africa
d) The ABC Murders
13) "boss i am disappointed in some of your readers they are always interested in technical details when the main question is whether the stuff is literature or not" — Why is the preceding sentence written without capital letters or punctuation? And, for a bonus: who is the "boss"?
a) It's written by e. e. cummings
b) It's sung by kd lang
c) It's written by a cockroach
d) It's written by an illiterate
14) For which writer was the past tense not such a proposition as he would wish any part of?
a) Dashiell Hammett
b) Raymond Chandler
c) Damon Runyon
d) Kurt Vonnegut
15) What's this? "To be, or not to be: that is the ask-thing: is't higher-thinking in the brain to bear the slings and arrows of outrageous dooming or to take weapons 'gainst a sea of bothers and by againstwork end them?"
a) The First Folio version
b) The Second Quarto version
c) The Anglish version
d) A recently discovered passage from Christopher Marlowe
Literary numbers:
16) At what temperature do books supposedly burst into flames?
a) 451 fahrenheit
b) 451 celsius
c) 451 kelvin
d) 451 newtons
17) What was Catch-18?
a) The rule that agents enforcing Catch-22 don't need to prove that a violation is actually contrary to Catch-22
b) The rule that because Catch-22 doesn't really exist it can't be repealed
c) The original title of Catch-22
d) Major Major's instruction to his sergeant that nobody is allowed to visit him unless he isn't in
18) What book begins with the words "There were four of us"?
a) Three Men in a Boat
b) The Sign of Four
c) SDP: The Birth, Life and Death of the Social Democratic Party
d) The Testimony of the Evangelists
19) In the book of the same name, what are the Thirty-Nine Steps?
a) Thirty-nine steps
b) The distance from the death cell to the gallows in Dartmoor Prison
c) A German spy network
d) A self-help programme for people with multiple addictions
20) Which of these stories is to be found in the Arabic classic One Thousand and One Nights?
a) Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves
b) Cinderella
c) Sinbad the Sailor
d) Aladdin and the Lamp
Screen couples:
Cinema and TV producers often pay repeat visits to the library in search of literary texts to adapt. In this section we pair the hero of one adaptation with the heroine of another. Identify the actors and the novel in question — and then match the tagline to its adaptation.
21) A story of Vengeful Thwarted Love
A passion. An obsession. A love that destroyed everyone it touched.
22) "The Gayest Comedy Hit of the Screen! Five Gorgeous Beauties on a Mad-Cap Manhunt!"
"Sometimes the last person on earth you want to be with is the one person you can't be without."
23) "A love caught in the fire of revolution"
"Turbulent were the times and fiery was the love story"
A quite interesting competition
How to enter
Write a question and answer in the style of one of the questions above, in one of the categories used. We need a question, a choice of four possible answers, and an answer that contains, in no more than 100 words, one or more interesting snippets of information relating to the question. E-mail it to bookscomp@thetimes.co.uk, with the subject-line QI Quiz, by midnight on October 18. Include your name, address and telephone number. No attachments will be accepted. The most ingenious, informative and entertaining entry — as judged by the production team of the TV show QI — will win. The winner will be informed by November 2.
The prize
Waterstone's has asked Cheltenham's artistic and executive directors, and six of the guest directors — Alice Roberts, Richard Eyre, Jonathan Coe, Anthony Horowitz, Monica Ali and Rageh Omaar — to each select a "book of the decade" for the past six decades. The winner will receive all 39 Cheltenham Decades titles, plus, thanks to Faber and Faber, a selection of QI books, including The QI Book of General Ignorance, The QI Book of Animal Ignorance, QI Advanced Banter, The QI Annual 2009 and The QI Book of the Dead.
Three runners-up will each receive a bundle of QI books.
John Lloyd and John Mitchinson, the QI head researchers, share their best facts, Everyman Theatre, Oct 10, 8.45pm. 0844 5767979; cheltenhamfestivals.com.
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