Fact Check: Unverifiable Book Reference

Identify, if possible, the book's intended audience (adults, young adults, or children); its genre (science fiction, fantasy, horror, romance, etc.); all remembered elements of the book's plot, especially any "odd" or particularly memorable scenes or incidents that might help differentiate the book from others with a similar plot; and any unique names, words, and phrases you recall from the book.

Searching yourself is a good place to start; then, you can post to a listserv or discussion forum, where someone might recognize it. Or, last but not least, leave a comment on this post! Try Google! Type in everything you can remember about the book — as in, “picture book rabbi animals advice yiddish” — and scroll through the results. (That’s a real-life example of a book a patron was asking for: It Could Always Be Worseby Margot Zemach.)

Older books tend to have some details of the plot in the subtitles, instead of a blurb on the jacket flap or back cover. Therefore they can be amusingly long and unwieldy (and are often known only by the main part of the title). The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner: Who Lived Eight and Twenty Years All Alone in An Uninhabited Island on the Coast of America, Near the Mouth of the Great River of Orinoco; Having Been Cast on Shore by Shipwreck, Wherein All the Men Perished but Himself.

The Encyclopedia of Popular Misconceptions: The Ultimate Debunker's Guide to Widely Accepted Fallacies. Carol Publishing Group. ISBN ... Kruszelnicki, Karl; Adam Yazxhi (2006). Great Mythconceptions: The Science Behind the Myths (2008 ed.). Andrews McMeel Publishing. ISBN ... Lloyd, John; John Mitchinson (2006). The Book of General Ignorance.

Can't remember a book name? Describe the plot or a character and our AI book finder will track it down. Free tool to find any book by description.

Desperate to find a book but you can't remember the author or title? Check out these easy ways to find a book from a vague description.

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.

Search any of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's original Sherlock Holmes books and you won't find the famed detective uttering "Elementary, my dear Watson” even once. Many common literary misconceptions extend beyond the page and to the world's most famous authors. For example: While it's true that Jane Austen didn't publish any books under her own name while she was alive, her identity was not very secret.

This number line below identifies a second printing printed in 1975. 75 76 77 78 79 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 · If you find the date on the copyright page matches the date on the title page, then it is probably a first edition. Most 19th century publishers placed the date of publication on the title page but that practice faded out after 1900 and the date became appearing on the copyright page. Some publishers make no statement at all about first editions but booksellers learn to identify firsts by other methods – for instance a particular piece of copy on the dust jacket or a mistake in the text itself that is corrected in later editions.