One of the most common phrases that I’ve heard since I started working in libraries is how “librarians know everything.” (Or some kind of variation of that sentiment)
Now, as much as I would love to pat myself on the back and bolster my ego with this sentiment, I regret to inform you that is not exactly true. Personally, I would say that librarians know how to find most everything; we are masters of libraries and information sciences after all. I mean it literally is what MLIS stands for, which is the degree most librarian positions require these days.
So now that we have established that librarians are particularly good finders, do you want to know what one of my favorite parts of the job is? It’s helping people find that one long lost book that they read forever ago, but can’t remember the title. I absolutely love this because it feels like a mystery, and I am the private investigator who is here to crack the case. It might more closely resemble an obsessed person with a board of red string connecting things to each other, but tomato/tomahto.
Today, however, I wanted to pass on the Sherlock Holmes-style hat (which, fun fact, I just found out is called a deerstalker), give it to you, dear reader, and walk you through a few of the ways that I go about trying to hunt down the elusive book. I’m not saying they’re the best or the fastest ways, but ones that have worked for me and hopefully will work for you should you take on the case.
Phase One – Gather the clues
Before looking into anything, I find it helpful to sit and write down the answers to a few questions that will help you locate the book. Information is key, and even the smallest tidbit can prove to be fruitful, so don’t focus too much on what you don’t know, and instead think about what you do know. Ask yourself:
- Do I remember when I read this book? How old was I when I read this, or even just the age range I was.
- Do I remember what the cover looked like? Any specific colors or imagery?
- Was it fiction or nonfiction? Do I remember the subject or genre of the book?
- Do I remember any of the characters’ names? Did they have any distinguishing features that might have been crucial to the story?
- Do any specific plot points stick out to my memory? It could be a side plot, or the main overarching plot of the book.
- Where and when did the book take place? Was it a real place? Were there any distinguishing parts of the setting that were important to the story?
- Was it a part of a series, or was it a standalone book?
- Did I check it out of JCLS, and do I have my reading history turned on? (Honestly, if the answer is yes then the search got infinitely easier, but I’m working under the assumption that this book was something that once was, and now is, lost, for none now live who remember it.)
Feel free to include anything else that comes to mind, but this I think is a good jumping off point to finally begin our search.
Phase Two – Begin the Search
OK, story sleuths, this is where the real work begins, and sometimes it really can be a time-consuming one. So make sure to take breaks and drink plenty of water, and don’t be afraid to set this down and come back to it. The book will still exist tomorrow.
To make things a little bit easier to follow along, I am going to use a personal example for this part. I remember reading a series when I was younger that I was a big fan of, probably in the late 90s or early 2000s. It had this kid who was training to be a knight but had to give up those dreams because he can use magic. So he goes to a school to learn, and then something happens, I can’t remember. The covers — I think — were an older style, like old Chronicles of Narnia paperback covers where it’s mostly one color but has a window shape with a scene from the book. One maybe it had a tower?
With this information, the first place I would search would honestly be Google, but that can be a double-edged sword; you’re casting a wide net. In this situation, it also causes a problem because when you search up terms like “book where boy goes to a magic school,” you’re going to get hit with a lot of Harry Potter results.
One way to get around this is to tell Google to exclude those terms. To do that, type the subtraction symbol in front of the term that you don’t want to see.
In this case we’d use – “Harry Potter” with the quotation marks to exclude that whole phrase. You could also just do an advanced Google search, which allows you to type in specific boxes and not worry about specific formatting.
With those results out of the way, there should be a better smattering of options that could potentially be the answer. From here, I’d probably check the images first to see if anything matches my original description or look for something that would jog my memory a bit so I can remember.
No dice? Well, in that case, let’s just browse through the first page or two of web results to see if someone else has inquired about the same book. There is honestly a wide community of readers online, and more than likely one of them has read this book you’re thinking about. Some sites I try and keep an eye out for are: Goodreads’ What’s the Name of That Book???, the reddit forum “Whatsthatbook”, and Library Things’ Name that Book. You could honestly even start there and skip the google search, because each of these sites has a search bar to filter through the posts.
Still nothing? No problem! We can try shifting around our search terms, maybe looking for lists of young adult fantasy books from the 90s or searching for young adult fantasy books with a tower on the cover. Look at the clues you’ve gathered and see if you can find another angle to approach this. It is also entirely possible that your brain is making stories of its own, and some of these facts are false memories. So, by swapping out terms or rephrasing them, I think it allows for that degree of human error to be accounted for.
By this point, I hopefully have found some potential titles to investigate more, and I would look up synopses of these titles. If the plot sounds close, but the cover isn’t matching up, I would look to see if there are alternative covers that do match the description. I usually do this by checking out used bookstores such as Thrift Books, which allows you to see a lot of different editions of the same title.
Now that I have done that, I can confidently say that the book we were looking for is, drumroll please…
The Circle of Magic: School of Wizardry by Debra Doyle and James D. Macdonald.
We did it, book detectives! Time to take down the board of clues and file them away until a new mystery comes along, but until that time comes, I say we reward ourselves with a pat on the back and a crisp glass of your beverage of choice. Case closed.
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Hopefully this has given you an insight into how I go about finding titles of books that have been lost to memory, and maybe you’ll finally get a chance to recover that one book that has been eluding you for years. Of course, this is an extremely quick crash course, and I acknowledge that there might be better resources or practices that I haven’t tried yet or forgot to mention in this post.
Also, don’t be afraid to ask for help! Sometimes a fresh perspective will give you a new idea to try. Just remember, it can be a marathon sometimes, so patience and tenacity are key. Like the wise sages Chumbawamba once said, “I get knocked down, but I get up again. You’re never gonna keep me down.”
Happy sleuthing, junior detectives!