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.
