Biblio File

Finding a Book When You lot've Forgotten Its Championship

Make 2020 your best reading year yet. Sign upward for the Book of the Twenty-four hour period electronic mail, and you'll get a daily book recommendation e-mail delivered to your inbox each forenoon. Find book recommendations here.

Library books lined up on a shelf Check out selected results from NYPL Championship Quest 2019, held Baronial 2, 2019, besides as Title Quest 2018.

This is an update of a previous post past Sharon Rickson.

It can exist tough to retrieve the title and author of a book you read a long time ago—even if it was a volume that was really important to y'all. Fiction is cataloged past author and title, not by discipline or plot line, which makes identifying books by but their storyline difficult.

Readers often ask librarians for assist finding these kinds of books. And we tin't figure out the mystery every single time, but we practise have a few tricks to assist detect the respond.

First, pivot downwardly everything you can remember almost the book, plot, character names, time period in which the book may have been published, genre, etc. All these details are clues in identifying the title and writer of the book.

Online resources tin assistance with your search for a one-half-remembered book, even if all you have is a basic plot line. Searching yourself is a adept place to get-go; so, y'all can post to a listserv or discussion forum, where someone might recognize it. Or, final only not least, exit a comment on this post!

Before Y'all Commencement

Try Google! Type in everything you tin can call up about the book — as in, "picture book rabbi animals advice yiddish" — and curlicue through the results. (That's a real-life case of a volume a patron was request for: It Could E'er Be Worse by Margot Zemach.)

You can likewise try googling ane cardinal detail you remember from a book. 1 of our librarians solved a volume mystery by searching "USS Yous-Know-Who" — the name of a gunkhole in the story that the patron happened to remember. (Another real-life instance: She Flew No Flags by Joan Manley.)

Crowdsourcing

  • What's the Name of That Book?
    A Goodreads group with searchable discussion posts and thousands of questions and answers.

  • Name That Book
    A LibraryThing group of ~3K members — many of whom are librarians or library-adjacent — who help solve book mysteries via threaded discussions.

  • The Fiction_L listserv
    Stumpers! Search archives of by questions, answered by an intense book-ish community, or subscribe and mail a new one.

  • Reddit's whatsthatbook thread
    A virtually endless thread of users trying to help other users retrieve volume titles, including several ofttimes requested books. Especially good for science fiction and fantasy.

  • "Stump the Bookseller" web log
    A cool indie bookstore in Ohio that maintains all-encompassing, searchable archives — and offers a $iv service for personalized help. Lots of children's books here.

  • Big Book Search
    If you can only remember what the cover looks like, endeavor this cover-search tool.

Library Databases (log in with your library card)

  • Books & Authors

  • Books in Print

  • The New York Times databases

  • NoveList and NoveList M-8 (in-library use but)

More Suggestions

  • If you tin can call back just one discussion, use the search part on Goodreads or Library Matter to find long lists of titles with a item word.

  • Goodreads' scan-able lists of titles that readers have shelved in unique categories, such as authors' professions or decades of publication, is besides be helpful.

  • For recently published books, the reviews in Booklist Online are broken down past detailed genre.

How to Move On

Sometimes, it'due south just non going to happen, and you lot can't detect that elusive volume you lot've been searching for. It's okay! Great news: The world is full of great books! Here are a few ways to observe more...

  • Check out recommendations from our volume experts here at NYPL. We offer suggestions via blog posts, the Staff Picks book finder, The Librarian Is In podcast, and more.
  • If y'all'd like a personalized recommendation, detect united states of america on Twitter or make full out our What Should I Read Next? email form.
  • Desire a brand-new read? Cheque out our favorite New and Noteworthy titles.

Feel free to leave a comment and tell united states about a book you're trying to recall! Our library staff members will pop in and bank check it periodically, and readers of this post are welcome to make guesses and suggestions.