Searching For Information on a Book


O.K., you want to find out about a book. Well sometimes the search is easy, you just put the title in Google or Yahoo or one of the other search engines and you can get all of the information you want, in fact too much. However, that isn't what I'm going to talk about today. What I'm going to talk about is finding information out about a hard to find book. Here the information is sometimes a little harder to come by. The easiest way for me to talk about searching for the information is to take you through a search for something - at least partially. That something will eventually have a page on our site, so finding out about the book could be a little easier after that happens. But for right now, let's try to find out about

Title: Slovenly Peter's Story Book Publisher: Mcloughlin Brothers, New York Date: Undated Illustrator: Edward P Cogger Binding: Hardcover; An illustrated terra cotta (reddish) cover, embossed in red and gold with a black background Pages: Unpaginated: [1] leaf, [48] p. : col. ill. ; 18 cm. Condition: Fair/no Dust Jacket; Ex-Library Size: 12 mo (about 5 by 7 inches or 12.5 by 18 cm)

Not suspecting this is a hard to find book, I go to viaLibri and put in Slovenly Peter's Story Book. I get three entries for the Print On Demand title Slovenly Peter's Little Story Book which is not what I want and two entries by the same seller for what looks like my book. The price? A very nice $1750 on the ILAB web site and an even higher price on the multi-dealer listing site ABE. [As an aside, this is typical of a lot of dealers. They charge more on those sites which charge them to list their books and then also take a commission on the sale - in this case about 13.5%]. Well, since the dealer is a member of the ABAA [Antiquarian Booksellers' Association of America] I figure this is a pretty legitimate price so I had better do some research on the book if I want to get a fair price for it.

First, I go over to the dealers web site. Sometimes a dealer will have something extra on their own web site about items which are not carried over to the multi-listing or search sites. In this case they don't have any more about the book, but they do have a couple of images which goes a long way to convince me we have the same book. They also give the author as Heinrich Hoffmann and the date of 1877. So maybe I've found out some additional information about my book.

A nice resource for all kinds of information is Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit. Looking up Heinrich Hoffmann [the author], I find that he was German and wrote Der Struwwelpeter, an illustrated book portraying children misbehaving. That sound like my book but it certainly isn't in German. I try a Google search for Hoffmann Struwwelpeter Slovenly. We find out from Wikipedia that "The first English translation appeared in 1848. Mark Twain's English translation of the book is called 'Slovenly Peter.'" Wikipedia even gives a link to the english translation of the entire book The Project Gutenberg EBook of Struwwelpeter. BTW: Project Gutenberg is a great place for free ebooks. So we have a little bit of history about our book.

We've seen that there appears to only be one copy for sale of our book, but what about other copies. Another good site for finding out about books is WorldCat, the OCLC World Catalog Program. Searching for slovenly peter's story book we get two results [and two results for slovenly peter's little story book]. This gives us some more information about the book and indicates that there were at least three printings of the book. Which one is ours? There isn't enough information to say yet but we're still looking. Although one of the entries says there are quite a few copies available around the world, looking at the actual entries of quite a few of them shows that the libraries have a copy of a different book. It appears there are not many available in libraries around the world. So we now know it is a rather hard to find book in general.

The last place I'm going to mention is the American Antiquarian Society and their online catalogs. If we go to the, particularly the AAS Basic search and search for Slovenly Peter's Story Book we see some of the same notes we saw on OCLC and some additional information.

Well, I've lead you thorough a few of the places to look for information about a book you might be curious about. There are certainly more places to look including the Library of Congress page for gateway access to LC's catalog and those at many other institutions, the Science Fiction Internet database, Fantastic Fiction, Bibliomania, and many many others. Hopefully this will get you started on developing resources of your own. If you find some good ones, you might even add a comment with the information.



>> 'til next time - DW <<

An update. I've put together a page for the book on our sight. There's a little more information. If you are interested and would like to see some images, see Slovenly Peters Story Book on White Unicorn Books