Lookup · 12 books indexed
Type a name, a place or one line you remember, and we’ll open the right book.
The finder searches every public domain book online in our catalogue by title, author, character, place, opening line, genre and reading time. It forgives accents and a couple of typos. Reading is free; nothing here costs anything.
01 · The index
Seven kinds of clue the finder understands
It is not a full-text search. It reads a hand-built index, one record per book, written by the editor who proofed that book.
Titles and authors
Full or partial. gatsby, eliot, o henry and ohenry all land. Articles like “The” are ignored.
Characters
About 90 names: darcy, dorothea, ahab, ishmael, daisy, clarissa, harker, mina, victor. Surnames and first names both.
Places
netherfield, pequod, west egg, whitby, black hawk, yalta. Houses, ships and towns the stories turn on.
Lines you remember
Famous openings and a handful of lines readers quote back to us. Six words in order is usually enough: truth universally acknowledged.
Genre tags
gothic, sea, jazz age, marriage plot, ghost story, russian. These are the same tags used on the catalogue filters.
Time you have
under an hour, an evening, a weekend, three weeks. Converted to minutes at 238 words a minute and matched to books or single stories.
Story titles
Every story in the three collections is indexed on its own. araby opens Dubliners at “Araby”, not at the first page.
02 · How it scores
Exact beats close. Close beats nothing.
Each word you type is folded first: lower case, accents stripped, punctuation dropped. So “Ántonia”, “antonia” and “ANTONIA!” are the same query. Then every record in the index gets a score.
An exact match on a title or a character name scores highest. A prefix match comes next, so middle finds Middlemarch before you finish typing. Single token matches count for less. Words longer than five letters are allowed up to two slips, which catches Frankenstien and Melvile. Short words get no allowance at all, because “dog” one letter off is “dig”, and that is a different book.
Time phrases are handled separately. “Under an hour” means fewer than 14,280 words, which rules out every novel and points at single stories. “A weekend” is set at eight to twelve hours of reading, roughly 115,000 to 170,000 words. Pride and Prejudice fits. Middlemarch, at about 316,000 words, does not, and the finder will not pretend it does.
Up to six results are shown, each with a line saying why it matched. Press Enter and, if one result is clearly ahead, you go straight to it. If two are close, the finder leaves the choice to you.
03 · Where it sends you
Three kinds of answer, and one honest fallback
A book page
Name a novel, an author or a character and you land on that book: Pride and Prejudice, Middlemarch, Frankenstein, Moby-Dick and eight more.
A story inside a collection
Story titles open the collection at an anchor. “The Gift of the Magi” opens The Four Million at that story; “The Dead” opens Dubliners at the last of its fifteen.
A filtered catalogue
Genre words and time budgets go to the catalogue with the filters already set, because “gothic” has more than one right answer.
Nothing scored
You see the genre collections and a link that opens the contact form with your query already written in. We reply and say whether we have it, plan to, or cannot host it.
04 · Common searches
What people type most, and where it goes
Taken from the questions we get by email, not from tracking the field. We do not log searches.
05 · Questions
Before you blame the search box
Does it search the full text of every book?
No. It searches an index of titles, authors, main characters, places, famous opening lines, genre tags and word counts. A full-text search across more than a million words would be slow on a phone, and it would bury the book you want under every page that happens to mention “letter”.
The book I want isn’t here. Why?
Probably one of two reasons. It is still under copyright in the United States, and we only host work published before 1930. Or it is public domain and we have not proofed it yet. We add about one book a month, never a batch. Ask, and we’ll tell you which.
Is my search sent anywhere?
No. The matching runs in your browser. Nothing you type is sent to us unless you press the link to ask about a book, which opens the contact form with your words already in it. How we handle that form is in the privacy policy.
Can I search for a reading-group pack?
Type “pack”, “large print” or “book club” and the finder sends you to reading groups. Packs are quoted by email. Tell us how many readers and when you meet.