How to Find That Book You've Spent Years Looking For
November / December 2003
Staff Utne magazine
Searching for a book you remember reading as a child, college
student, or happy dropout, but haven't seen anywhere since? On the
Web, there are now numerous ways to expand your hunt beyond Amazon.
Abebooks (www.abebooks.com)
is a consortium that connects you to thousands of used-book stores
around the world. Another search site is the Berkeley-based
Bookfinder.com. You can
also search a growing number of individual stores online, including
the Portland-based Powells
(www.powells.com) and
Bolerium Books in San Francisco
(www.bolerium.com), which
specializes in rare books on labor issues and radical history.
Meanwhile, your local library can be a great help, too, thanks
to a practice called interlibrary loan. Libraries across the
country will lend you books and other materials, creating a vast
collection that's easy for you to access. Here's how: If you don't
find what you're looking for in your library's catalog, ask a
librarian to locate it elsewhere in the huge national loan network.
Tell the pros as much about the book as you can. Title and author
are most important, but publisher and publication date (or even a
good guess at it) can be helpful too. They'll do the rest.