Quiz Book: 10,000 Questions

We’ve written a book, aptly named ‘The Big Pub Quiz Book’. It’s over 500 pages long and has 10,000 questions.

It’s currently available at a very good price on Amazon, where any positive ratings or reviews, if you deem them merited, are kindly received (nudge nudge).

We put a huge amount of effort into it, and hope lots of people buy it, like it and use it for whatever purposes they choose.

In deciding on the format and content of the book, we wanted it to cover a wide range of things that we think has made us good at writing and hosting quizzes over the last two decades.

We divided it into six chapters, each one with a different emphasis.

1. People have enjoyed playing our Friday Quiz for many years, so we thought it would be nice to offer a glut of “Friday” quizzes, one for every day of the year, and a little bit more – so the first chapter is called ‘The Daily Quiz’. The “multi-answer” question 5s are a big part of the fun of the Friday Quiz. Lists like that are even more subject to aging than standard questions, but we’ve done our best to cover that in the wording, and if any answers do age, I hope that will be accepted and understood, as those kind of questions are, we’ve realised, a particular pleasure for quizzers.
2. Down the years, we’ve run a lot of quizzes for children, or for family events, or with a particular directive that questions shouldn’t be too hard, so the next chapter is called ‘Family-Friendly’, and includes several relatively easy quizzes, often on school subjects. Hardened quizzers should still find lots to entertain them, or they could use some of the questions for quickfire or buzzer questions.
3. The next two chapters might be described as the real meat of the book. The first of them is ‘Ready-Made’. It contains 50 varied 40-question quizzes. In the 1000s of quizzes we’ve run down the years, we’ve generally considered the format of the round more important than the topic – we think great quiz rounds can be more than just a collection of questions. So, in this chapter, we’ve tried to capture the spirit of the quizzes that host for a vast range of audiences, with lots of different formats which we think will help people run their own eclectic and balanced quizzes.
4. Having said that, the next chapter, ‘Subject Rounds’ is topic-based. It’s for people who want to dig out a whole load of questions on a particular, classic, subject (Geography, Sport etc). There are 2000 questions in total.
5. The last two chapters, we hope, will provide lots of fun. They’re two of a kind, really, but the first one, ‘Specialist Subjects’, is more sensible. 150 10-question quizzes on varied specialist subjects. We’ve tried to make sure all the rounds are inclusive, though, and even if you think you know nothing at all about, say ‘Dutch Art’, there’ll be questions you can answer.
6. The final chapter, ‘Something Else’, is more offbeat. When we used to run regular pub quizzes in SW London, we’d run a round called Blitz, where, week on week, we’d accept silly subjects from the participants and include them the next week. So, these rounds are inspired by that. The working title of the chapter was ‘You Won’t Find This Anywhere Else’. Well, we can’t promise that, as there are a lot of fertile minds working in quizzes, but there are certainly lots of unusual formats and topics here, and we hope you’ll take particular enjoyment in this chapter, which was probably the most fun to write.

The main thing we wanted the book to be is varied – in topic and in difficulty. Not all the rounds are the same standard. Some of them are mainly easy, some of them are a bit easy then get hard, some of them are pretty hard all the way through for those that like that kind of thing. But we don’t think any level of quizzer will feel excluded for long. If one page isn’t for you, turn the page and we think the next one will be.

So, there we go, 10,000 questions and answers – currently for £4.99 – that’s 0.0499p per question – much better value than Bob Dylan’s recent one-off recording of ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ which sold at auction recently for £1.5 million, and only ask nine questions and gives only one extremely woolly answer. And yet, who wins the Nobel Prize for Literature? Seems unfair.