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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.

Earlier this week the LA Times printed a story about four Martin Luther King Jr. books which are slated to be brought back into print in time for the celebration of what would have been King's 80th birthday (Jan. 18th, 2010). 

This sort of thing happens all the time, books that have been all but forgotten are rejuvenated with a new print run allowing new generations to enjoy them.  Most of the time I hardly give this a second thought since it happens so often however this week I have been spending a lot of time looking at books on the verge of the in/out-of print boarder line.

I have been allocating all my spare time to research for the annual BookFinder.com Report - which lists the most sought after out-of-print books in the US, and more often than not these are the books that are right on this line.  Last year a number of books on our list were brought back into print due to the surge in popularity and I think we might see a few more this year.

When finished list is always interesting to read but for every book that makes it onto the list there are a number of books which just fail to meet our criteria because they are brought back from the out-of-print abyss just as interest in its out-of-print counterpart starts to increase.

One such book is the autobiography of moonshiner Popcorn Sutton titled Me and my Likker.  A local legend in Tennessee as a distiller he wrote the book in 1999 only to have it fall out-of-print for ten years until this past March when Bent Corner Books, a Knoxville bookstore, republished the work after Mr. Sutton's passing.  It is still amazingly hard to find, but it is back in print.

If I get the time I might try and compile a blog post with a few more of these near-misses but in the mean time I have to get back to the report.

[Now reading: Vernon God Little by DBC Pierre]