What's the Name of That Book??? discussion

Suggestions for people to try to find books before (and after) posting their requests

While the point of this community is to ask for help, doubtless many OP's would be equally happy to have found books themselves. Therefore, this thread was created for experienced book finders to suggest and advise on resources and methods they use to find lost and forgotten titles.

For a general guide on how to search for a lost book, the Library of Congress provides a very easy and comprehensive guide and the basics. It is highly recommended that you read this before starting out:
http://loc.gov/rr/program/bib/lost/no...

This article is also provides lots of search tips and advice to find a book:
https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/how-to-...

I will update this post accordingly with helpful sites, databases, forums, and the like which will hopefully provide a useful one-stop shop for starting a search. This is by no means exhaustive yet, so feel free to offer more suggestions and ask clarifying questions in the thread.

________________________
Basic searches
1. Have you tried ___ ?
* Google?
- Google Books? Advanced search? (tips for searching Google Books)
- Amazon? (Use filters to narrow results.)
- Wikipedia?

2. Where did you get the book?
- local library: If you took the book from your local library, maybe the library still has it, or it may be in your check-out record. Use the online catalog, or ask in person, what have you. (e.g. Chicago Public Library)
- online seller, ebook, Kindle, etc.: Check your buying history, email, etc.

3.. Databases, etc.
- World Cat
- Library of Congress
- Novelist Plus is a subscriber database you may be able to access through your library/online.
*LibraryThing tagmash - find books by tags, combinination and restriction
- Bookfinder is a engine which searches the stocks of hundreds of thousands of booksellers

4. Goodreads
- Check your own reading history (as well as on any other site/journal you may use).
- Browse by genre and look at popular titles of that genre, e.g. Noir
- Search for relevant Listopias, and browse the books, e.g. Best Highland Romance
- Inquire in relevant Groups with lots of knowledgeable members, being careful to follow group rules and posting guidelines; e.g. SciFi and Fantasy Book Club has a "lost books" section

5. Also:
- TVTropes - find relevant trope page, and look for examples in the Literature subheading, then reverse search with the trope name (e.g. "Hitler's Time Travel Exemption Act")
- Allreaders: http://allreaders.com/booksearcha.asp#S1
- Bookshare: https://www.bookshare.org/cms
- Fictiondb: http://www.fictiondb.com/
- Librarybookslists: http://librarybooklists.org/index.html
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Resources by genre, tropes, covers, etc.

*Search by cover (Big Book Search): http://bigbooksearch.com/
Book Cover Archive: http://bookcoverarchive.com/
Vintage Children's Book Covers/Illustrations (1940s-1970s): https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

*Internet Speculative Fiction Database:
http://www.isfdb.org/
Cornell Science Fiction & Fantasy Research Guide: http://guides.library.cornell.edu/c.p...
Fantastic Rome: http://home.netspeed.com.au/reguli/fa...
Young Adult Dystopias by decade:
http://eldritchhobbit.livejournal.com...

*Historical Novels by time period/region:
http://www.historicalnovels.info/

*Romance books by genre, subject, etc. (Eye on Romance): http://www.eyeonromance.com/index.cfm
Also: https://www.romance.io/topics/best/all/1
All About Romance (special title listings): http://allaboutromance.com/readers-ch...
The Romance Reader letters column takes requests for lost books/has an archive of found books: http://www.theromancereader.com/

*Mystery database which sorts books by location, historical period, protagonist, etc. (Stop You're Killing Me): http://www.stopyourekillingme.com/Loc...
Historical mysteries (Crime Thru Time): http://crimethrutime.com/

*Old Children's Books: http://www.oldchildrensbooks.com/book...
Choose Your Own Adventure Books: http://www.gamebooks.org/show_series....
Gamebooks: http://www.gamebooks.org/index.php

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Forums/sites similar to What's The Name

Inquire, and look at other people's similar searches:
- "Name That Book" (LibraryThing): http://www.librarything.com/groups/na...
- "BookSleuth" (AbeBooks): http://forums.abebooks.com/discussion...
- "Stump the Bookseller" (Loganberry Books): http://www.loganberrybooks.com/stumpt...
- "What was that book?" (Livejournal): http://whatwasthatbook.livejournal.com/
- "What was that one?" (Livejournal):
http://whatwasthatone.livejournal.com/
- Reddit: /r/whatsthatbook, /r/suggestmeabook, and /r/printSF

Kaion wrote: "Anyone got some good tips?"

in the three years I've been here my to-read shelf has grown from hundreds to near 4,000 and climbing every day. From seeing friend' updates, other members' shelves, books mentioned in groups and lists. My non-Goodreads friends contribute too as do book reviews, but mostly it's Goodreads.

Kaion, could you be more specific? Are you talking about finding a specific book (like this group does) or more generally?

Sorry, I meant about finding specific books-

I'm not a great solver or anything, but it seems like a lot of the people who come for help here could probably just use some tips to finding books by themselves. (And I'd like to pick up a few as well.) You know, what tricks do you guys use to find books?

I love using the LibraryThing tagmashes: http://www.librarything.com/tag/circu...
You can exclude and include terms.

Oh. Well, there is google books and google in general. Put in keywords And genre specific sites where you can also put in keywords.

And often, people know the books; they've read them and they remember them.

Which genre specific sites do you use?

*I realize that, but I meant for the people to find their own books. Whole "teach a man to fish" concept.

For me, it's generally Google Books, and trying different combinations of keywords.

Loganberry Books Stump the Bookseller helps people find children's books and reading through the threads can be quite helpful.

http://logan.com/harriett/stump.html

What's That Book.

http://www.whatsthatbook.com/index.ph...

Book Sleuth: http://forums.abebooks.com/abesleuthcom

Very helpful thread - good idea Kaion!

I agree. Very helpful resources.

Indeed. Lisa, maybe mark this thread as important, so it stays on top?

Rivka, How funny. I was just coming back to do that!!! Yes.

:D

And in general.

And, I'm about to clean up the general folder. Again.

Advanced Search at WorldCat (the Library database/indexer):
http://www.worldcat.org/advancedsearch

And the Library of Congress:
http://catalog.loc.gov/

Thanks, everybody. Keep them coming as you find more resources.

The Cooperative Children's Book Center (CCBC) of Madison.
http://www.education.wisc.edu/ccbc/

Like this forum, you need to supply them with as much info as you can remember. I refered a friend on another site to this group in November and they were able to help her find the title of an old book in a matter of days. She was then able to locate a copy on ebay for a Christmas present.

A large number of public libraries subscribe to a database called "Novelist Plus" ("Plus" because they've begun to cover nonfiction as well) where you can search by a number of descriptors. The listings have a brief plot description, as well as book reviews from media sources, target age of reader (adult, young adult, etc.) and subject tags. You can search by all of these and more. It's very comprehensive. You can search with natural language, it isn't tricky to use.
Check out your local library's database listings, you can access it from home with your library card number.

Google, hehe.

I just found the plot of a title I was thinking of at www.fictiondb.com

Thanks, Natalie. That site looks interesting.

Cindy wrote: "Advanced Search at WorldCat (the Library database/indexer):
http://www.worldcat.org/advancedsearch

this is an excellent search engine! I've been racking my brain for a year looking for the title of a book that I could not remember! I found it in one shot! Thanks for posting this. I added it to my favorites! :)
Here is the book! It's excellent!

Surprisingly, Amazon.com works very well. Type in a basic search term and it lets you break the results down by genre, and it has a fair amount of older and out of print books. Breaking it down by genre is something google books is horrible at, and while GB is great for locating rarer or out of print books (because it indexes publications like the Horn book or academic texts that often cite contemporary books) it's useless for anything but very specific, extended tags due to all the old public domain and magazine stuff littering the field. If they ever get better filters it will be amazing. You can however sort by date.

Library Thing also has a tag cloud, where users apply tags to books, and can also help sometimes. I'd kill for a searchable school library journal or horn book database though.

Dmdutche, Thanks for those tips.

I've not made much use of it yet, but for science fiction you could try www.isfdb.org.

Thanks, Cheryl.

http://www.loganberrybooks.com/stump....

This costs $2 to pose a stumper, so be sure you put in all relevant information, especially the date you read it and the country you were living in (which I see missing often in queries here, but which can really help jog a solver's memory and can help in searches, too).

Romance readers,

I just wanted to let you know that those of you who are having difficulty recalling the title of a favourite romance novel can post your book search in the Romance Book Sleuth group as well.

Link: http://www.goodreads.com/group/show/6250...

The group is new but it already has many knowledgeable members.


Jenny

I've also had good results with "whatsthatbook"
Something along the same lines that I'm interested in is finding illustrators. I got started in this group trying to find a book and I think the outstanding feature of the oriental myth was the illustrations; still haven't found good resources for that. Sadly, I'm still on the hunt for the book (1950's, more a picture book than chapter book for elementary ages, oriental story about girl, emperor, maybe a cowherd, maybe a nightingale, sort of dreamlike pictures,maybe 35-50 pages long).

TVTropes.
Asking in the libraries for the records of the books I have borrowed.
Looking in collections/publisher catalogs.

Also, akinator.

ah, yes, akinator.com if a seeker knows enough about the character... good idea!

Adding this site, "Fantastic Rome." Surprisingly exhaustive site of fantastic fiction either fantasy or science fiction about the Roman empire:

http://home.netspeed.com.au/reguli/fa...

Also, if you search Google books, here are a few tips.

intitle:"Title" will filter by title

inauthor:"Author" will filter by Author

bibliogroup:"Name of Series" will give all books in the name of a series. VERY helpful for things like Harlequin romances.

subject:"bonsai" will give books whose subject is bonsai.

You can use multiple filters in a single query. I believe you can also do partial searches, like Intitle:Alien to get books with "Alien" in the title. However there is always no space after the colon, and I'm not sure any terms after the first will be part of the title. For multiple terms use quotes.

The quotes though are also for exact combinations and you can also use them with normal terms.

red dog gives results where red and dog appear in any order.

"red dog" forces that exact phrase with no spaces. Though punctuation doesn't count. You'll see red. Dog as well.

You can also uses quotes to force odd spellings and disable the autocorrect Google likes to put on queries. "Jhon" boy will not return John boy results.

Also, don't forget the sidebar! You can filter results by a specific date range. 1/1/80 to 1/1/90 for example. You can also leave one range blank: from 1/1/80 gives all books from that date and after, to 1/1/90 gives all books only up to 1990.

The search options are very powerful, but also keep in mind Google Books has millions of books in its database, as well as many magazines. The more specific a phrase or part of a book you remember, the more chance you have to find things.

I hope this is helpful to all my fellow searchers.

Thanks, Dmdutcher. Very helpful.

Oh excellent, thank you.

You're welcome. I also found this list by Eldritch hobbit which breaks down young adult dystopian literature by decade:

http://eldritchhobbit.livejournal.com...

Great resource.

what about a short story finder? I have a friend who's tasked me with finding an SF short story she read about 10-15 years ago. I thought I had a link to something for short stories but I can't find it.

Lindig, You can still search google books using keywords that were in the story or story title, and it might show up.

Something I've found useful when searching for a word or phrase on a very long webpage is pressing Ctrl + F. It will make a little seach box pop up and when you enter the word it will highlight every instance of it on the page. (This works for PCs; I'm sure there's something similar for Macs, but someone else will have to say what steps/keys that requires.)

Tx for the reminder, Abigail!

I've just discovered this site:

http://www.gamebooks.org/index.php

This is a reference for "choose your own adventure" type of books, and is very exhaustive. They have a complete list of CYOA books themselves at

http://www.gamebooks.org/show_series....

while listing other series, including Which Way, Endless Quest, and others. Great resource.

http://www.smalldemons.com/index

Pretty new, but the idea is that if you know, say, a song that a character in the book loved, you type in the name of the song and Small Demons would give you the name of the book. Hopefully their database will grow.

Cheryl in CC NV wrote: "http://www.smalldemons.com/index

Pretty new, but the idea"

Cheryl, What a wonderful idea for a site. I'll definitely try it out.

LiveJournal has similar communities:

http://whatwasthatbook.livejournal.com/

http://whatwasthatone.livejournal.com/

Although, the second community covers more than just books.

Thanks, Rebecca.

Another forum (scifi) to ask in:
http://www.sffworld.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?69-Help!-Do-you-know-%28SF%29

Thank you, J...!

Less extensive a resource, but this site shows distinctive books covers, which I know someone people remember better than the plot details.

http://bookcoverarchive.com/