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Today we published the 2014 Bookfinder.com Report which features the 100 most sought after out-of-print books in America.  The big surprise this year annual report was that after years on the throne the Queen of Pop (Madonna)’s photographic escapade "Sex" was finally knocked off the top of the list, and the book(s) that took its place may surprise you.  There were in fact two, and you can read about them here.  What I wanted to talk about on the blog, however, are some of the usual suspects there were some interesting additions and subtractions to this year’s list.

Back In-Print:

2014 edition

Avid readers will notice that A.C.H Smith’s Labyrinth novelization is noticeably missing from the top end of the report; the book has been a part of the BookFinder report since 2010 and was finally re-published in April as Jim Henson’s Labyrinth and contains updated cover art.  I’m not sure the books target age group would have any idea who David Bowie is anyway.  According to reviews the books both stay quite close to the movie’s plot line however the novel replaces Bowie’s musical interludes with additional dialogue; and Smith also draws out the dialogue in a number of scenes.

Another graduation was In A Dark Place: The Story of a True Haunting by Ray Garton who’s book has been on the BookFinder.com Report since 2008.  The fact that it was republished December 31^st 2014 left me on the fence as to whether I should remove it from this year’s list, but considering precious few of you would have gotten to read an in-print copy in 2014 I decided to leave it on this year.  In 2009 the book became the basis for the hit film The Haunting in Connecticut (starring Virginia Madsen).

New to the BookFinder.com Report

An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion by Dorothea Lange this book was featured heavily in the photographer’s episode of PBS’s American Masters series (snippet below) which aired late August 2014.  The full episode covered Lange’s five decades photographic work which documented Great Depression, the Dust Bowl and World War II Japanese internment camps and more.  You can find a wide array of Dorothea Lange’s other work on BookFinder.com.

Another new, and timely, entry to the list was Margin of Safety by Seth Klarman.  The books author, who has been singled out by Forbes as one of the most successful hedge fund managers of recent years, was quoted numerous times this year after his 2013 year end investor letter was leaked online.  In the letter he preaches caution and warns of today’s stock markets being too bubbly, and that today's investors should take warning.  The fact that his track record for posting huge growth has remained in tact all these years has lead to his 1991 out-of-print value investing opus to fetch four figures, when you can find it.

Every year I find stories about these books buried within the list, and every year I also miss some amazing stories.  Read the full list and let us know any of your interesting stories about the books within.

For the first time since 1991 The Abandoned (aka Jennie) by Paul Gallico is coming back into print in the United States.  The book has been featured on the BookFinder.com Report, for the most sought after out-of-print books in America, 5 times including each of the last 3 years.

The novel is about a young London boy who is hit by a large truck while attempting to save a stray cat.  When he comes to he realizes that he has been transformed into a feline himself, and with the help of a savvy stray, Jennie, learns to navigate the tough city of London on four paws.

The latest publisher of the book is The New York Review of Books, and I got a chance to ask their publishing Editor, Edwin Frank, why he decided to bring the book back into print after so many years.

“When I was a kid I had a friend who loved Gallico, and remembering that I read "The Abandoned" around the time we started the kids book series. I didn't acquire it right then, but it stuck in mind--it's a memorable book--and it kept coming up in surprising ways in conversations with different people, always an interesting indication. So I bought it....”

The New York Review of books edition of The Abandoned is set for an April 9th release, but you can pre-order a copy now.

Every year around this time the BookFinder.com team puts our heads together, crunches the numbers and cranks out the BookFinder.com Report; a snapshot of the nation's search trends for out-of-print books.  After 10 years of researching the most sought after out-of-print books in America, we’ve learned a few things:

• Sex still sells: 20 years after it was first published, Madonna’s Sex has been the most sought after out-of-print book on BookFinder.com for the past ten years.
• Nora Roberts has very little influence on her fans: Despite Nora Roberts pleading with her fans to avoid Promise Me Tomorrow (a book she herself has described as mediocre), the book remains painfully expensive and highly sought after. 
• Stephen King knows this pain all too well, he decided to take his novel Rage, which is about a school shooting, out-of-print some time ago and he just can't seem to shake the demand.
• Publishers should re-print more Alice Starmore books: Starmore is a rock-star of the knitting world; known for creating some of the world’s most intricate patterns and having written a number of books.  Her book Aran Knitting appeared on every BookFinder.com Report from 2003-2010 until it was re-printed in 2011, only to be replaced by Tudor Roses (#60 in 2011 and #13 in 2012).  Starmore also has several other out-of-print books including In The Hebrides (1995) and Stillwater (1996).

Many of the books we see on the BookFinder.com report persist on the list for years.  Sometimes they were simply limited-run books that remain popular and demand always outstripped supply. Sometimes a popular author decides they want a certain chapter of their writing career to stay firmly in their rearview mirror (see Roberts, Nora).  However, even after 10 years, there are still out-of-print books coming back out of the woodwork.  Here are a couple of this year’s surprises:

• Kyle Onstott’s Mandingo has featured on several past reports. However, this year the author appeared on the 2012 Report three times: Mandingo, DRUM, and The Black Sun; more than any other author.
• Big League Sales-closing Techniques by Les Dane is considered by many to be a salesman’s bible, even though it’s been out-of-print since 1971.  Word-of-mouth recommendations on internet bulletin boards and review sites have pushed the price of this out-of-print guide through the roof.

• Pure, White and Deadly; the Problem of Sugar by John Yudkin was first published in 1972 and outlines research showing that refined sweeteners are closely associated with heart disease and type-two diabetes.  The book was all but forgotten, despite being highly topical, until it was featured in Robert Lustig’s lecture “Sugar: The Bigger Truth” which attained YouTube viral success.   Because of this, Yudkin’s book was re-printed in the UK but remains out-of-print for Americans.

See the 2012 BookFinder.com Report, the hot 100 out-of-print books of the past 12 months.

If you are at all familiar with BookFinder.com you probably know all about our annual BookFinder.com Report which tracks the demand of the 100 most sought-after titles which are no longer in print in the United States.  The list differs from year to year as trends change and books get republished (Indie publishers take note, there may be a hidden gem in the list for you.)  This list is no different as number of titles from last year’s report have been republished in the past twelve months including The Sixteenth Round: from Number 1 Contender to #45472 by Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, Old Southern Apples by Creighton Lee Calhoun and Aran Knitting by Alice Starmore, leaving room for some new additions.  

In fact Alice Starmore, a superstar in the knitting world, took her own spot on the list. Aran Knitting lived on the BookFinder.com report for years before getting re-published in 2010 and now another one of her works, Tudor Roses, has jumped onto the list to take its place.  Tudor Roses is interesting because it includes a number of sweater designs inspired by the Tudor royals (eg. Henry VIII and Elizabeth I) and their over-the-top gold embroidery, velvet, jewels and lace.

Current events also have an impact on the list.  In A Payroll to Meet, David Whitford discusses the incidents surrounding Southern Methodist University's (SMU) receiving the "death penalty" from the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA); which involves banning the school from competing in a sport for a year or more (two in SMU's case).  This book has been out-of-print since 1989 but scandal in college football has never been more in vogue.  The recent rash of cheating, bribing and recruitment scandals to hit Ohio State, Southern Cal, Auburn, North Carolina, Oregon, Tennessee, LSU, and the Hurricanes in Miami have renewed the interest in the grandfather of college football scandal.  I somehow doubt this book will see reprint but it’s always interesting to well researched books jump back into the spotlight because of current events.

View all 100 books in the 2011 BookFinder.com Report

The eighth edition of the BookFinder.com report is now available for your reading enjoyment.

We changed up this year’s format ever so slightly, and have provided a list of the top 100 most sought after out-of-print books, regardless of category.   Among some of the usual suspects (Madonna’s Sex is, not surprisingly, once again on the top of the heap) we have some very interesting newcomers, including:

• The Secret of Instantaneous Healing by Harry Douglas Smith (a guide to mental healing)
• Basic Building Data by Don Graf (A compendium of tables and facts for anyone with an interest in selecting the right materials, location, and layout for a construction project).
• William Burges and the High Victorian Dream by J. Mordaunt Crook (a biography on the great Victorian era architect William Burges)

It also brought a smile to my face seeing Fly Fishing by J.R. Hartley show up in the list. This, of course, is the book that anyone who lived in the UK in the 1980s would remember from the now classic Yellow Pages advert which featured an man traipsing around London's used book shops looking for an old book, only finding success with the telephone directory. 

Neither the book, nor the author, existed at the time of the when Yellow Pages created this commercial.  So why, you may ask, is this book found in the BookFinder.com report? 

The beauty of this whole scenario is that in 1991 a spoof memoir by the fictional Mr. Hartley was published due to the popularity of the ad, and now the spoof is the out-of-print book which is sought after.  It kind of reminds me of the time paradox in Terminator, only with used books instead of cyborgs.

See the whole list in the 2010 BookFinder.com Report

So now that the BookFinder.com report has been available online for a few weeks, I wanted to mention a few of the interesting books which we were forced to cut from the list.  By this I don't mean all of the thousands of in print books but rather books which nearly made the cut, I mentioned one such book in a post way back when I first started researching this years Report but there were many more.

One example is Dead in Dixie by Charlaine Harris which is technically out-of-print however after a short discussion we decided to leave this one off the list.  You see the book is an omnibus edition of the first three novels in Harris' Sookie Stackhouse series.  All three books are still available and a boxed set  as well as individual editions so we decided that Dead in Dixie failed to qualify.

Perhaps more interesting was The Essential Woodworker by Robert Wearing.  This book was last published in 1998 and is most definitely out-of-print, but was only ever printed in England.  So even though buyers in the US are eagerly looking for this book, and there are no new copies being printed, technically, we could not include in the list as it has never been in print in the United States.

The title which I was the most displeased with having to leave off the 2009 BookFinder.com report was Mother of the Children of the Holocaust: the story of Irena Sendler by Anna Mieszkowska.  This would have been our number one Biography however this book was also never printed in the US. 

The book details the work of Sendler who was a social worker who served in the Polish Underground during the German occupation and saved 2,500 Jewish children by smuggling them out of the Warsaw Ghetto.  Copies are very hard to track down and at the time of writing this post there are no copies available on BookFinder.com.  If you like you can keep checking back here, but unless we see a reprinting I would not hold my breath

Outside of the great story within what made this book so interesting was that despite the fact it had never been printed in the US it was adapted into a "Hallmark Hall of Fame production", titled The Courageous Heart of Irena Sendler and broadcast on CBS April 19, 2009.   With that kind of press and huge search volume, I think a publisher could do well with a North American reprinting.

We have released the 2009 edition of the BookFinder.com Report.

The Report tracks the most sought-after out-of-print books in America, breaking down demand for popular out-of-print titles in ten different genre categories.

As usual this edition features a number of books with very interesting stories:

• Cop Without a Badge by Charles Kipps, had a sudden spike in demand after a run in with The Real Housewives of New Jersey
• The Recently Deflowered Girl by Edward Gorey, got a second wind on the back of an internet meme
• Secrets of the Federal Reserve by Eustace Mullins, a conspiracy theory propped up by the economic collapse

There are many more so go ahead and read the whole 2009 BookFinder.com Report

Also if any of you are interested I will be on CBC Radio One tomorrow (September 17th) on the All Points West program between 3:30-4:00pm PST.  I will be talking to Jo-Ann Roberts about the BookFinder.com Report.  If you like you can listen online here.