How to order or enquire about books.

Use the search interface in the left side-panel to specify your search. Once you have located a book you are interested in, you may add it to your shopping cart or use the enquire button to send an enquiry to the bookseller. You can add as many books as you wish to your shopping cart and can review and edit its contents by clicking the View Cart button at any time before transmitting your order to the bookseller(s). A copy of your order or enquiry will be e-mailed to you. The bookseller(s) will then contact you to confirm the sale and settle payment and delivery details.

How to search for a book.

Before initiating your search, we recommend you select your preferred language (top right) and adjust the settings selected from the drop down pick lists to the lower left. These will not be reset when you click the Clear button.

By default, the entire database is searched. However, you can limit the search to booksellers from a particular country using the drop down pick list to the lower left, or click on the Bookshops link on the navigation bar above to search for a specific bookseller. In addition to a search, individual booksellers' stocks can be browsed and their catalogues searched or browsed.

Enter your search criteria using the interface in the left side-frame. As a general rule for criteria, less is better because our system matches most of the words you enter. It is therefore better to leave out any words you feel unsure about. "Steinbeck" will return a more comprehensive list than "John Steinbeck". If your criteria result in a very long list, you can easily refine your search by adding more specific search criteria. The results of your search will appear in this main frame while your search criteria remain visible in the left side-frame.

Our search uses initial strings: "Heming" will find "Hemingway" (but not "Hemmingway". Booksellers also make spelling errors!), "H G Wells" will find "Wells, Herbert George".

Accented characters are searched intelligently: "Eglise" will find L'église", "Buecher" will find "Bücher" and vice versa, but "Bucher" will not find "Bücher".

If you cannot find the book you are searching for in the current database, you can add or edit your own list of Wants and you will be informed by e-mail as soon as a match is entered into the database. You need to be a registered Bibliophile Bookbase user to do this. To register, click the Login link above.

Author: if the author's surname is a common one, you should specify one or more initials in addition. If you are uncertain of the spelling or the name is very long, you can search using the initial part of the name: "Dost" will find "Dostoyevsky", "Dostoevskii" etc.

Title: if you are uncertain of the precise title, specify only the part of which you are sure. A few words are usually sufficient: "war worlds" will find "The war of the worlds".

Imprint: publisher and place published details, as well as year of publication, may be specified in this field. Booksellers and publishers themselves over a period of years can be very inconsistent in the formulation of a publishing house name. Minimise your search words.

Date range: Use four digit numbers for years. Left field populated, right field blank yields all dates from the year specified to the present. Right field populated, left field blank, yields all dates up to the specified year. Two fields populated - books printed between these years, inclusive, will be displayed. For books published in a single year, either enter the year in both fields or enter it in the Imprint field.

Any word(s) or ISBN: a book will be returned as a match if the word or words in the Any word(s) field occur anywhere in the book entry. The ISBN search calls for 10 digits or 9 digits plus X. Spaces and hyphens are ignored.

Additional criteria - note that many booksellers do not specify these criteria for every book so that, for example, many books with dust jackets will not be returned when "Dust Jacket" is selected.
- Hardback - select this criterion to return only books specified to be hardbacked by the booksellers. The unselected, default option returns all bindings including those unspecified by the bookseller.
- First Edition - select this criterion to return all books specified by the booksellers to be first editions. However, read the book description carefully to determine the precise "first edition" being referred to. 
- Inscribed - read the booksellers' descriptions of the nature of the inscription. This can range from signed by the previous owner to detailed annotations by the author.
- Dust Jacket - select this criterion to return all books specified by the booksellers to possess a dust jacket.

The five drop down pick lists are mostly self-explanatory. These are not reset to default when the Clear button is clicked. "Sort by relevance" is a weighted sort balancing the number of times a criterion occurs against the length of the field contents in which it occurs.