Our theme for the month of March is “How to.”
Congratulations, aspiring library worker. Some patron has broken through the sea of printing-related questions that dominate your reference desk shifts to finally ask you about a goddamn book, which you’re pretty sure is the reason you went into the field in the first place. You dare to dream that they will have an unquenchable thirst to read in the same niche subgenres that you do, and that any books that you recommend will be readily available in the patron’s preferred format. (This is a vain hope, but you are young.)
Alas! The paragon of midwestern middle-aged womanhood who stands before you is not an avid reader of queer British historical romances or grimdark fantasy heist novels; instead she is looking for a specific book, one that she read in the distant fogs of the past and is keen to revisit… if only she could remember the title.
The good news: You are prepared for this question, if not by experience than by the various librarian Facebook pages and list-servs you follow. “I don’t remember the title but the cover was red” was the first library meme you ever encountered.
You whip out your handy five-step guide and get started.
Step 1: Ask Clarifying Questions (or: Prepare for Disappointment)
Start with a softball: was the book fiction or nonfiction? Try not to get angry when the patron does not know (regardless of whether she does not know whether her book was fiction or nonfiction or not know what the difference is). Most people who are reading nonfiction know that they are (the same cannot be said for fiction readers), so assume fiction to start.
Try to ascertain approximately when the book was read. Most of the time, your chances of success will decrease as the time between when the book was read and when the title was forgotten increases, as all books read before 1990 have a strong chance of being a Quaalude- or Reagan-induced fever dream, depending on the reader. On the other hand, fewer books were written back then, so don’t give up hope when the response to your question is “oh, at least twenty years ago.” (NB: All patrons over the age of forty think the 80s were twenty years ago. Don’t be fooled.)
Other clarifying questions that would be useful here include “was the book set in the past or the present,” “was the main character a man or a woman” (the main character is never nonbinary), and “is there anything else, at all, that you remember about this book.” Unfortunately, the odds of the patron knowing the answers to any of these questions is extremely low.
Step 2: Google (or: Disappointment)
Begin to desperately start throwing any and all information that the patron has given you into your search engine of choice (don’t forget to add “book” to the end of your searches!). Rearrange your terms every couple of searches in the vain hope that “purple cover woman inherits large house England ghosts book” yields better results than “large English house with ghosts inherited by woman purple cover book.”
Keep in mind that if you do enough searches like this, Google will start populating your results with useless articles about how to find a book the title of which you can’t remember, all of which include the very helpful suggestion to “ask a librarian” (please, we have enough on our hands as it is).
It’s very important during this step that you forget every search technique, database, and book that you’ve ever heard of.
Step 3: Realize that the Patron is Lying to You (or: Confront the Frailty of the Human Condition)
At some point in your search—maybe here, maybe at its conclusion—you will realize that some (if not many, if not most) of the information that the patron has given you is not true. The house the woman inherited was not in America, not England. There were no ghosts, but the book has flashbacks about people who used to live there. The cover can only be described as purple if you failed art class.
This is probably not the patron’s fault. You don’t remember what you did last weekend (and not because of any Quaaludes), so is it really that surprising that a woman thirty years your senior might forget the title of a book she read last year? She’s as apologetic about forgetting the thing as you are about being unable to find it.
If it helps, feel free to add some contemplation of “there but for the grace of God go I” to this step (or, more accurately, a “there regardless of the grace of God go I in thirty years”).
Optional Step: Find the Right Book
Step 4: Conclude the Interaction (or: Feel Like an Idiot)
Fortunately, you can feel like an idiot whether you fail or succeed. If you fail, why not hate-watch some of those TikToks where librarians race to find the titles of books and always manage to do it in five minutes or less? If you succeed, feel free to stew in the fact that it took you ten minutes to figure out that the title of the book you were looking for, the only thing about which the patron knew with any certainty was that it involved someone inheriting something, was called Inheritance?
Step 5: Get a Bit Better (or: Feel a Bit Better)
Take a moment to appreciate that you did, in fact, figure out what the patron was looking for. Or, if you didn’t, that you were able to recommend something similar. Or, if you weren’t, that you really, truly can’t win them all. Review your readers’ advisory tools, even if you’re just going to forget them again next time. Maybe browse the unsolved posts on r/whatisthatbook to rebuild some self esteem.
Remember not to worry about it too much. The next patron who comes to the desk wants to MacGuyver her grandchild’s open house invitation into a birthday card using the copier alone. You’ll ace that one for sure.
That was a genuinely entertaining read. 🙂