SYP Quiz 2011

Posted on September 5, 2011 in Uncategorized

Another summer, another great SYP Quiz, and £1,000 raised for The Book Trade Charity.

A lively mixture of publishers and SYP-ers congregated at Camden’s Proud two weeks ago, in a room usually reserved for “burlesque, dancing and freak shows”. Team names ranged from The Young and Stationery, via I Shot the Serif, A Farewell to Answers and A Quizit from the Goon Squad to the nominated best-name-winner Tequila Mockingbird. Teams competed in five tricky rounds written by quiz-master Paul Stark and wittily read out by Richard Mollet, CEO of the Publishers Association.

Questions spanned literary geography (“What American city is the destination for Sal Paradises’ first east to west road trip, and home to the adult Amir (from the Kite Runner), bounty hunter Rick Deckard (from Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep) and private investigator Sam Spade (from the Maltese Falcon)?”), to English Language (“The Etymology of the London can be traced back (through londinium) to lodnom, the saxon word for a wasteland. True or False?”) to old favourites (“If on the ning nang nong the cows go bong and the monkeys all say boo, what happens on the nong nang ning?”) – answers below please.

With a very tense leader-race, Saved by the Bell Jar, a group of heretofore strangers who were bonded by their love of publishing, quizzes and puns, were pipped to the post by a team from Sphere, cunningly christened Sphere and Present Danger. The triumphant team were rewarded with more hard-earned wine for their efforts. You can see more pictures of our competing teams on the SYP facebook page.

Adding to the fantastic fundraising for The Book Trade Charity, we are very grateful to the following raffle-prize donors who helped make the night such a success: Harper Collins, Penguin, Quintet Publishing, Profile, ILA, Henley-on-Thames literary festival, Slightly Foxed, Chalke, Primrose Bakery and Booktrust.

The Book Trade Charity, a worthwhile cause, is the trade’s own welfare charity offering financial assistance to those in circumstances which include disability, long-term or terminal illness, redundancy, debt including rent arrears, poverty or carer situations, as well as assisting unemployed people from the trade by funding re-training courses to allow them to get back into the job market. For further details of the Book Trade Charity you can contact David Hicks on email at: david@btbs.org