How to Find That Book You’ve Spent Years Looking For

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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 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 and Bolerium Books in San Francisco, which specializes in rare books on labor issues and radical history.


Utne Reader Bookshelf


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.

  • Published on Nov 1, 2003
UTNE
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