NoveList and NoveList K-8 (in-library use only) Library Databases (log in with your library card) If you can only remember what the cover looks like, try this cover-search tool. Especially good for science fiction and fantasy.Ī cool indie bookstore in Ohio that maintains extensive, searchable archives - and offers a $4 service for personalized help. Stumpers! Search archives of past questions, answered by an intense book-ish community, or subscribe and post a new one.Ī nearly endless thread of users trying to help other users remember book titles, including several frequently requested books. (Another real-life example: She Flew No Flagsby Joan Manley.) CrowdsourcingĪ Goodreads group with searchable discussion posts and thousands of questions and answers.Ī LibraryThing group of ~3K members - many of whom are librarians or library-adjacent - who help solve book mysteries via threaded discussions. One of our librarians solved a book mystery by searching “USS You-Know-Who” - the name of a boat in the story that the patron happened to remember. You can also try googling one key detail you remember from a book.

(That’s a real-life example of a book a patron was asking for: It Could Always Be Worseby Margot Zemach.) Try Google! Type in everything you can remember about the book - as in, “picture book rabbi animals advice yiddish” - and scroll through the results. Or, last but not least, leave a comment on this post! Before You Start Searching yourself is a good place to start then, you can post to a listserv or discussion forum, where someone might recognize it. Online resources can help with your search for a half-remembered book, even if all you have is a basic plot line. All these details are clues in identifying the title and author of the book. And we can’t figure out the mystery every single time, but we do have a few tricks to help find the answer.įirst, pin down everything you can remember about the book, plot, character names, time period in which the book may have been published, genre, etc.

Readers often ask librarians for help finding these kinds of books.

Fiction is cataloged by author and title, not by subject or plot line, which makes identifying books by just their storyline difficult.

It can be tough to remember the title and author of a book you read a long time ago-even if it was a book that was really important to you. This is an update of a previous post by Sharon Rickson. Find book recommendations here.Ĭheck out selected results from NYPL Title Quest 2019, held August 2, 2019, as well as Title Quest 2018. Sign up for the Book of the Day email, and you'll get a daily book recommendation email delivered to your inbox each morning.

Mount and blade sneak into town