
How To Find A Book By Description
One of my favorite reference librarian questions came from a patron who said she wanted to read the latest Danielle Steele book, which she’d seen at the local grocery store. It had a blue cover. As she gave me the things she could remember about the book cover and title, I realized she wasn’t talking about a Danielle Steele book, but a Daniel Silva book. She’d hoped I could find a book by description and indeed, I did—it just wasn’t the book she’d hoped it was.
We’ve all been in the position of hoping to find a book by description at some point if we’re readers. Even for someone like me who writes down every book I read and have since high school, there are times I remember a scene or pieces of a book’s story that make me realize I’ve forgotten the title or author and I desperately want to reconnect with the book. Fortunately, there are a lot of ways to help you find a book by description. I’ve compiled some of my best tips and tricks as a reader and former librarian to help you track down those former favorite gems. Note: these tips are also useful if you’re itching to find a new-to-you book based on some keywords or descriptions of things you really like or want to know more about.
“Mermaid cover” and “young adult” brought up a sea (heh) of blue tinted covers for the book. But I know that the book did not have a blue cover. The first page of results doesn’t look especially promising here, as the results are primarily about mermaid book covers on young adult books (which makes sense since that’s literally the search).
From here, I’ll add another detail I remember to the search. You do not need quotes around single word descriptions, but you will want to include a + between them, so that Google picks up all of those search terms as critical in the search.
I thought adding Texas would drill down a bit more, but in this case, it didn’t. It did remove the blue covers popping up at the top, but it highlighted The Little Mermaid more than anything. I don’t think that book was set in Texas, though, and I know for a fact that the book was not actually about mermaids. It just had one on the cover.
Often at this point in a book search, I like to tab over to images. I’m a visual learner and my memory is sparked by how something looks. This might not be ideal for everyone, but it’s especially useful for those who remember book covers.
With the “mermaid cover” “young adult” + Texas search, these are the image results:
None of these covers looked right to me. It’s time to refine that search, this time using the piece of information I remember that I think will really refine the results: “trailer park.” I suspect there aren’t a lot of books featuring mermaids in trailer parks.
Since I can’t remember if it was set in a trailer park or rather in a trailer, my first search will be the simpler one, using the single word trailer. Again, this will require a plus sign after Texas.
The results for this search aren’t getting me anywhere new, and the results after the last one are to adult-themed sites. This is always a possibility when you’re searching key terms and ideas, for what it’s worth. Because this search didn’t change anything, I’m going to refine the final term from trailer to trailer park, which will be in quotes.
Google will be searching for anything with the terms “mermaid cover” and “young adult” and Texas and “trailer park.” My results will absolutely narrow down. Maybe even to the book I’m looking for.
Except in this case, it did not. I won’t share the image of the results, since it’s all links to adult websites. When you use quotes around ideas and use them in conjunction with other quotes, Google searches for only results that have all of those words exactly. In many cases, this would be useful. In the case of this search, it’s not.
But if I took this search and removed all of the quotation marks, maybe that would help. Instead of searching for all of the words exactly, Google will search for each of these words individually and bring back results that fit the most of those words in ranked order. You do not need to use a + sign in this instance. The + is only useful for quoted term searches, where you want the exact phrasings all to be included.
This search brought up a book cover with a mermaid on it right at the top that looked familiar. When I clicked on the first image on top, featuring the mermaid on a cover, I was taken to the second result below to a page on Penguin Random House’s website for Martha Moore’s Under The Mermaid Angel. Unfortunately, the website was a dead link. Fortunately, the link below the one I clicked led to the Goodreads page for the same title. Here’s the book’s description:
Thirteen-year-old Jesse leads a pretty boring life in just about the most boring place in the universe — otherwise known as Ida, Texas. She cannot forget the death of her baby brother seven years ago, and how she just couldn’t pray for him when he was sick. She never talks about it though, not even to her best friend, which is something she doesn’t have, anyway. But all that changes when Roxanne moves into the trailer next door. Thirty years old, with her fake fur coat, wild red hair, and romantic notions, Roxanne is a revelation to Jesse. Why has she moved to Ida, of all places? Their growing friendship will change Jesse’s life, giving her back a vision of hope beyond the mundane world around her.
Although it did not hit all of the search criteria in the description, it did pick up on a number of them, namely Texas and trailer. Reading reviews of the book showed that Google picked up some of the additional terms from those reviews and indeed, this was the book I wanted to remember. Success in four quick searches!
Using a variety of search terms, in a variety of quoted and unquoted means, helps narrow down your Google searches to find a book by description.
An additional trick is to use the – symbol while searching. This will remove any search results that include a specific word (or phrase, if used in quotation marks). In the above search, for instance, knowing that the book was not about mermaids in water, I may have selected to do this as a search, too:
This actually brought up even better results, since Moore’s book is pointed to in all of the top results. It would make me more confident that this was indeed the book I hoped to find.
Any phrases or details you can remember about a book will help your Google skills in this capacity. Again, don’t forget to check the images tab, too, especially if your memory is most vivid around book covers. This was exactly how I deduced the Danielle Steele/Daniel Silva mystery for a patron.
There are other ways to modify Google searches, as well, and you can play with some of those Google tips and tricks offered in their guide.
If you look on the lefthand side of the image above, you’ll see that the option exists to limit results to juvenile (aka children’s books, middle grade books, and young adult books), so putting it into the search bar isn’t necessary.
WorldCat can be especially useful if you’re searching for a book by description and aren’t seeking a specific title. For example, if you’re seeking children’s books set in Latin America, you can do a search for Latin America, then limit your search to juvenile and go from there. It’s like your library catalog, but with access to every record for every library that’s part of the world catalog, which is a whole lot of them. You can get a few more tips on how to use WorldCat to find a forgotten book here, as well as some insight into a couple of other databases that might help you find a book by description.
Library-focused listservs can also be useful, whether you yourself subscribe and ask a question or you ask your local library to seek the book out for you via one. The Fiction-L listserv, hosted by the Cuyahoga Library System, is an excellent resource. Even if you don’t subscribe to it, there is a search feature from the subscribe page. A savvy searcher might plug their own key terms for a book into the search box and see someone else has asked about the same book.