If you’re like us and love to read, then click here to score tons of free and discounted ebooks.

Have you ever lost track of a favorite book from your childhood because you can’t remember the title or author? Do you have the story on the tip of your tongue? Can you explain the plot, describe the cover, or know the era, but just can’t remember the one detail you need in order to actually find the book? We’ve been there and know exactly how frustrating this can be. Below are a few tips we’ve used when searching for a lost book we love.

Tips to Find a Book When You Don’t Know the Title or Author

If you’re currently suffering from a case of book amnesia, try some of these tricks to see if they can spark your memory and help you remember more than a vague cover image or a quirky side character you loved.

First, Wrack Your Brain for Book Memories

When it comes to finding a book you have only a vague recollection of, you need to fish out everything you can possibly remember about it from your memories. Answer the below questions to see if they help you recover any additional information about your book.

• What did the cover look like? Do you only remember a fuzzy image that’s predominately one color? Even that is a clue! If you think hard, do you remember any elements on it? Was the author’s name in large print, or was the title large? Any of these details can be the difference between success or failure.
• Can you remember a phrase, quote, or a particular paragraph of the book? Sometimes you can remember lines you felt were funny or meaningful or just plain weird. Write them down as best you can for your search. Odds are that same phrase may have stood out to someone else too.
• What can you remember from the plot? Even if you’re not entirely confident, write down what you think you remember. You might find your memory looks something like “boy gets kidnapped. Girl best friend says she’ll find him. I think she becomes a detective at some point or runs into him later in life and they fall in love. The boy may be involved in drugs or something sketchy when she runs into him. I think at one point he wakes up in a dumpster.” Even though you’re not one hundred percent certain, you can try different searches with the elements you think are there and hopefully in one combination, you’ll get a hit. Or, hopefully your details will be close enough that someone else can piece the elements together.
• Can you remember any characters’ names? Remembering one or two of the characters’ names will also be a huge help in your search. Even if they’re side characters and not main characters, write them down.
• What genre was it? If it was fantasy, do you remember any details to narrow it down to a subcategory of fantasy?
• Do you remember any other story-related details, like a city name, street, location, pet, era, etc.?
• Do you remember any details related to publishing? Do you remember whether your school or library that you got the book from often bought books from a certain publisher? Do you remember when the book was published? For example, if it was a book you read from your childhood, then you know you can exclude any recent publications. Or, perhaps you remember that it was a new book that came out when you were in high school, then you’ll know to look for books published only in those few years. Do you remember any other similar authors that people seemed to also read if they liked the book you’re trying to remember?

Remember to write down as much information as you can, and maybe you’ll remember some more details in the process of finding your lost book.

Google and Other Search Engines

When you first try to search for a forgotten novel, you probably turn to Google or a similar search engine. Unfortunately, your average search may not be able to get you the results you’re looking for. Because of the vast volume of novels with similar plot elements and various SEO tactics and companies skewing the search results to favor their products, unless the book you’re searching for happens to be one of the most popular books of its kind, you’re going to have to do a deep Google.

Let me explain. If you’re looking for a book about mermaids, but you’re definitely not looking for something super popular like Disney’s The Little Mermaid, you may become frustrated that no matter what variation of “mermaid” search terms you try, you still find Little Mermaid results popping up on top because Disney can afford to pay people a lot of money to make sure their products stay on top of the search results.

So when searching for a forgotten novel, you’ll often have to use all the different details you remember from the book with Google’s different search functions. For example, quotations will be your friend to make sure Google doesn’t try to eliminate distinguishing details. The addition symbol will be useful for linking multiple elements into one search. Try using the Advanced Google Search Page with filters like subject, publisher, language, and publication date as well.  Another tip is to always check the image results. If you’re on the right track, then sometimes an image result will appear more quickly than general search results. There are other advanced Google search skills that you can give a try too, like excluding specific keywords or using the wildcard operator to guess the name of a character.

Google Books Search

The Google Books Library Project now makes it possible to find books by searching through their text and content. The Books Search reference page also displays book specific information like various covers, tables of content, common terms and phrases, and popular passages from the books. You can quickly view sample pages to ensure that the book you’ve found is the book you’ve been looking for.

There are several other book databases you can find as well, such as Book Finder, Word Cat, LibraryThing, Book Sleuth, Goodreads, Amazon’s Advanced Book Search, and Library of Congress. However, if you haven’t been able to find the book you’re looking for with a Google search, you probably don’t have enough information to find it in one of these databases either. If you want to give some of these a try though, these are some of the ones we find the most useful.

• Book Cave: This site has the unique feature of being able to search through a rated books database. So if you know a book was a children’s book, you can avoid any adult rated book. Or if you know it’s an adult rated book you can exclude anything milder.
• The Library of Congress: This the biggest online library in the world and has a search engine capable of combining search parameters with keywords. There’s also an interesting option called “Ask a Librarian” where you can send an email and try asking for help in finding your book.
• Worldcat: Worldcat is a catalog of over 70 thousand libraries in 160 countries. Here you can look for a specific keyword, and you’ll get a list of book titles in various languages. There’s also a “Fiction Finder” section where you can search for a book by a character or place in addition to a keyword.
• Big Book Search: If you can only remember what the cover looks like, try this cover-search tool.
• If you can remember just one word of the title, use the search function on Goodreads or Library Thing to find long lists of titles with a particular word.
• Goodreads’ browse-able lists of titles that readers have shelved in unique categories, such as authors’ professions or decades of publication, may also be helpful.

Turn to Reddit or Other Popular Book Forums

Is there anything that the people of the internet don’t know? If computerized searches fail and you need a personalized touch, there are thousands of fellow book lovers out there who would love to help you out. Places like Reddit, Tumblr, Goodreads, and several other bookish forums have book sleuths that seem to be able to solve even the vaguest of mysteries. Reddit in particular has several dedicated sections such as Tip of My Tongue, What’s That Book, Books, and PrintSF for when you can only remember the cover. Just take a scroll through the book section of Reddit to find a thread that best meets your needs. If Reddit isn’t your thing, check out some of these other book forums and groups:

• Goodreads What’s the Name of That Book? is a group that will help solve your book mystery after you’ve done a valiant effort to first find it yourself.
• LibraryThing’s Name That Book is another place where you can post about your forgotten novel. Just follow their instructions and try to wrack your brain for as many details as you can, and fellow readers will do what they can to find your book.
• Stump the Bookseller is a blog run by a cool indie bookstore in Ohio that offers a $4 dollar service to help readers find lost books, specifically childhood books. Plus they have large searchable archives that you may find helpful as well.
• The Fiction_L listserv is another place where you might be able to get some help, although they don’t seem to have a section dedicated exclusively to finding lost books.

Ask Your Own Social Network and Community

Post on all your social networks, reach out to friends from the time when you were reading the book, and ask a local librarian or even old school teachers. You might be surprised to find that your personal community is the missing link needed to find your book. Communities often have similar interests, so the books you enjoyed as a child might be the same books your friends and others in your town also enjoyed and borrowed from the library.

Your own circle may be especially helpful if you can remember the time that you read the book. If you know you read the book in junior high or high school, reach out to your friends from that era and see if they remember anything about the books you were reading back then. If you’re like me, you probably have a whole friendship circle of readers and you probably not only told them about every book you read but also offered to let them read it as well so you could talk about it. You never know what odd memories a person may be able to recall from their past.

When All Else Fails

If you’ve gone through all of these things and still aren’t able to find the elusive book you’re looking for, then you may have to accept that it’s not going to happen or even that you may not be remembering it correctly. I remember one story about a person looking for a particular Danielle Steele book who later realized the book she was looking for was actually by Daniel Silva. These kinds of close but not quite recollections are understandably frustrating because while you’re confident you’re looking for the right thing, in the end you were actually going down the wrong rabbit hole the entire time and may not even have realized it.

Another consideration is whether what you’re looking for is even real. There have also been times in my life that I’ve been convinced something that happened in a dream was real life, and oftentimes my dreams take up various elements of books I’ve read. Could you possibly be remembering a detail wrong or combining several different books from your past? Whatever the case may be, hopefully you can at least be somewhat cheered up by the list of books you’ve uncovered in your search that at least have many similar elements to what you were looking for.

Happy reading!

How to Find a Book Without the Title or Author: A Complete Guide

--

What to do when you remember a book but have no idea what the title or author is.

Originally published on Ashlee Craft’s World.

Recently, I’ve been obsessed with figuring out the names of books I read when I was younger. It’s part of a grander obsession of mine to remember + document things from my past. For a couple of years, I’ve been keeping kind of a running list of books I had memories of, but no idea what the titles were.

Over the past few weeks, I remembered a bunch more books that I had to know what they were called. Just like when you hear the melody of a song in your head but you can’t remember what song it is, trying to remember the name of a book is the annoying kind of thing you’ll lie awake thinking about, & the kind of thing that will keep bothering you & gnawing at your brain until you find the answer.

If you remember a book but you have no idea what the title or author was, here are a few tips that I used to help me figure out what every single book on my must-know list was called. It feels so good to finally know!

Normal Google Search. This is a good general place to start in any book search. If you can remember any words from the title or character names, this can be a great way to find the book. Years ago, I remembered a book I’d read from the library. I remembered that the cover of the book featured a girl sitting in a barn with a dog, that there was a character named Jenny & one named Sam, & that the book was pretty old. Initially in my searching, I only remembered the main character’s name was Jenny, but later in my search I remembered Sammy as also being a character. I knew the plot of the book & that there was a character with an old-sounding name that began with an “H” who the main character told stories about to some younger characters. After searching various combinations of the keywords “Jenny Sam book invisible”, I found Jenny, Sam, & the Invisible Hildegarde.

If there are any books, series, or authors that keep showing up in your search that definitely don’t have to do with the book, try advanced search to exclude those words. Also, the more combinations of potentially relevant keywords you try, the better off you will be. You can also try searching for things like “book about _______________”, & add as many relevant keywords as possible. The more details about the book you can provide, the easier it will be to find it. Think about including keywords regarding things such as professions/ages/genders of characters (teenage boys, lawyers, kids), features of characters (if they were friends, animals, a club, etc), time frame story takes place in (1950’s, war time, futuristic), place (magic world, England, Florida, old barn), intended audience or details about the book itself (children’s book, old book), or things characters do/what happens (go to the beach, club for conversations about ideas, guy gets murdered). The “book about ____” format helped me remember The Famous Five series, which I had been searching for, & “ladybug book with transparent pages” brought up Ladybugs & Other Insects (With Transparent Pages).

Google Image Search. Much like the aforementioned “Normal Google Search”, searching for any keywords you can remember about the theme of the book — even if they seem quite random — can help you find the book, especially when coupled with using Google Images. The title alone might not ring a bell, but when coupled with seeing the title & cover, you might experience a “EUREKA!” moment.

In one of my searches, I remembered a series I had sometimes read. It was about some preteen girls who time traveled into the past to have adventures, based upon (I believe) a treasure chest in an attic. After searching some keywords relating to this topic, I found The Magic Attic Club books, which was what I had been looking for. Additionally, this worked well when I wanted to find a book I’d read as a child, which featured a colorful, artistically-drawn rooster on the front. Relevant keywords & the utilization of Google Images brought up Barnyard Banter, a book I enjoyed a lot when I was three years old.

Library Records. If you got the book at the library, finding it may be a little easier. If it wasn’t too long ago, even if you no longer have a library card at that library, searching for keywords relevant to your book could bring it up in their system. Some libraries allow you to view a complete list of every book you’ve ever checked out. Searching this list could be helpful, provided that you still have an account at that library.

I was searching for a book I’d read about four years ago. I remembered it was kind of science-fiction themed, as I was in the phase where I read sci-fi books & books about physics/time travel/chemistry/astronomy extensively. I remembered reading it in the fall or winter, when I was in my phase of being obsessed with the band Queen, so I must have been reading the book sometime between September & March of 2011–2012. The book was about some kids who lived in England/Scotland, who, during the war (presumably World War II), were sent to live on a farm with relatives of theirs. The book had really beautiful descriptions of things, & I unfortunately had to send it back before getting very far into it.

After the above methods of Google searching things like “book about kids England farm war” didn’t bring up the book, I decided to look with the library system. I got the book when I lived in a different county, so I couldn’t view those library records. The library did however email me every week regarding books that needed to be renewed. After looking through the emails they’d sent me in the designated time period, I found the book, which is called A Traveller in Time. You could also try describing your book to a librarian, who may be able to find it for you.

Amazon Search. Amazon searches can be helpful in two different ways. Amazon is better if you have more relevant keywords which are part of the title or a major theme/topic of the book. If you have an idea of the topic or important word in the title, you can search Amazon for that, then narrow them down by category, age range, or other specifications, which can be helpful. I remembered a funny fiction book I had gotten from the library when I was obsessed with reading about manatees. I searched the keyword “Manatees” on Amazon, then narrowed my search to fiction. I found the book Key Manatee this way. I also used this search method to find a non-fiction children’s book about Salmon that I read when I was eight years old. I searched “Salmon”, narrowed it down to juvenile non-fiction, then looked at the publication dates for books published before 2003. This was how I found the book, which is merely titled Salmon.

Google Books. This was perhaps the very best search method I found, especially for books which I could not find based on the other methods alone. Google Books allows you to search the full texts of millions of books, & any keywords you came up with relating to the book you’re searching for are going to be especially helpful here. Here are three types of searches I recommend in Google Books.

• Try searching Google Books by theme keywords. I remembered a paperback chaper book my mom had read the first few chapters of to me when I was about six years old. I remembered the cover, but the other methods of searching had not helped me find the book. All I could remember about the theme was that it had four main characters, & that the first character the book discussed was a girl sitting on a swing who got turned into a frog, & that the whole theme of the book was “be careful what you wish for.” I searched Google Books for “be careful what you wish for frog”, & discovered the book was called The Wish Giver: 3 Tales of Coven Tree.
• Search Google Books for actual quotes from the book. Yesterday, someone around me made mention of the phrase “go jump in a lake”, & I was eating a piece of cake, which compelled me to connect the phrases & remember a quote from a childhood book. “Go jump in the lake, said the chocolate cake.” I remembered a poetry book for children. There was a poem about food with the aforementioned chocolate cake line, a poem about snow covering everything in a city, & a bunch of other kind of funny poems about things. The first poem in the book included the lines “Gooseberry looseberry gooseberry jam.” I searched Google Books for these quotes, & rediscovered Blackberry Ink.
• Search any random keywords from the text that you can even begin to remember. The most frustrating, & long-lived book search I had been engaged in was a hunt to find a book I’d read when I was eight years old. The book had a lion, possibly other similar animal characters like giraffes or elephants. There were four animals characters in this book and they were friends who had some sort of club where they met in this tree house or by this tree. The book was about having good morals, like being honest & having self-esteem & such. I also remembered it had somewhat glossy bright white pages, was a medium sized book, had illustrations every few pages, & the illustrations were fairly realistic & well-drawn. I had been looking for this book off & on for a few years, & no amount of Google searches was bringing it up. After my luck yesterday in discovering the above books in Google Books, I decided to give it a try. The keywords “lion tree house virtues” or “lion tree house club” weren’t bringing up the book. Some part of my brain vaguely had an idea of the word “golden” being used on one page of the book. I searched “lion golden friend”, seemingly random keywords, & amazingly, The Treasure Tree: Helping Kids Understand Their Personalities came up, & it was the exact book I was looking for.

Rare Book Search. BookFinder.com allows you to search common & rare books alike, including out of print books, using a combination of keywords, publication dates, etc. It seems to have a lot of books & give pretty extensive search results, & if you find your book on here, it shows you somewhere you can buy a copy of it. I tried using it to find The Treasure Tree before I knew what it was called, & although I didn’t see it on there, I feel this search engine is a valuable tool for any book lover to know about.

Social Media, Friends, & Family. Social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Goodreads, Yahoo Answers, & other forums are another good way to find out what a book might be called. I didn’t get to the point of describing the book on social media & asking for suggestions of what it might be, but I think it could give you some great suggestions regarding what your mystery book could be. With some of the books I remembered, I didn’t really know what they were about as much as I remembered the way they looked (like in the case of the Salmon book), but provided you knew the general theme or plot of your mystery book, social media might be a valuable thing to try, especially if you still cannot find your book from all the other methods. Talking to family or friends about your book may also help you figure out important details or keywords about your book, & they may even be able to tell you what it is.

With these tips, I’m sure it will only be a matter of time before you know what the mystery book that’s been bothering you for the past five years is. You will finally be able to feel relief in knowing exactly what it was you were searching for, & relax as you read your now not-a-mystery book. Until the next time you remember an obscure but for some reason, important book from your past.

But this time, when the all-too-familiar feeling of needing to know what a book is called fills your mind, you won’t have to feel helpless. This time, you are armed with the knowledge & resources to track down your awesome forgotten book, & you will be able to find it both quickly and accurately. Happy book searching!

—

If you could click the little green heart & like this article, it would mean a lot to me because it would help other people find my work on Medium.

With gratitude,

Ashlee