Cheeky displays in libraries that highlight patrons who come in looking for a book only by something they faintly remember about it such as a blue cover or the word “heart” in the title. I love those displays and have done a few of them myself. But what I love more are the actual readers advisory interactions with said patron to try to find the specific book they were looking for. This happened several months ago in our high school library and I haven’t gotten it out of my head.

I’m going to start by spoiling the ending– we found the book.

Specifically SHE found the book again by endlessly combing the shelves in the area she remembered it being after we both spent several afternoons going back and forth about what she remembered and where she remembered discovering it on the shelf one day after school.

She remembered the “diverse characters on the front cover” and that they were in a kind of “school setting” and that it was in “this specific area” in the fiction section.

In this case, I wasn’t much help, but she persevered. She ended up checking out the book because when she had first pulled it off the shelf she had only started a chapter or two and hadn’t checked it out then. I like that she ended up finding it herself, maybe if only to remind myself that I’m human. And I loved that there was a happy ending- a reunion of book and reader.