A few months ago, I was in a used bookstore in Vermont, the kind of place where the shelves go floor to ceiling and the owner’s cat sleeps on the counter. I was there for an hour, maybe longer. I walked out with four books, three of which I’d never heard of before walking in. One was a memoir by a woman who’d worked as a lighthouse keeper in Nova Scotia in the 1960s. Another was a slim novel by a Uruguayan writer who, according to the back cover, had published three books and then disappeared from public life. The third was a collection of essays about beekeeping that was written so beautifully it made me angry, angry because I’d never heard of the author and angry because the book was out of print and clearly deserved not to be.

These are the kinds of books I’m talking about when I say “books nobody else is reading.” Not obscure for the sake of obscure. Not difficult or niche or avant-garde. Just books that fell through the cracks of the publishing industry’s attention economy and ended up forgotten by everyone except the used bookstores and libraries that keep them alive on their shelves. Finding these books is one of the great pleasures of being a reader, and I want to share some strategies for doing it consistently.

The first and most obvious strategy is to spend time in used bookstores. Real time. Not a quick browse on your lunch break, but a dedicated hour or two where you commit to looking at every shelf, including the ones in genres you don’t normally read. Used bookstores are time capsules. They contain books from every era of publishing, organized (usually loosely) by genre or subject, and priced low enough that you can take a chance on something you know nothing about. The financial risk of buying a $4 used book is essentially zero, which frees you to follow your curiosity without the calculation that accompanies buying a $28 new release.

When I browse used bookstores, I follow a few informal rules. I look for books that are in good condition, which suggests they were valued by their previous owner. I read the first paragraph of anything that catches my eye, right there in the store. If the first paragraph makes me want to read the second, I buy it. I pay attention to publishers. If I see an imprint I respect on the spine of an unfamiliar book, that’s a signal worth following. I look for books from specific time periods that I know were productive for particular genres. American fiction from the 1970s, for instance, is full of extraordinary mid-list novels that were well reviewed at the time, sold modestly, and vanished. British nonfiction from the 1990s has a similar wealth of overlooked titles.

Libraries are equally valuable, and I think readers underuse them for discovery. Most people go to the library with a specific book in mind. They search the catalog, find the book, check it out, and leave. But libraries are browsing environments, just like bookstores, and browsing the physical shelves is one of the best ways to find books you wouldn’t have encountered otherwise. The library’s classification system puts books in proximity to related books, which means that if you’re looking for a specific title on, say, the history of the Ottoman Empire, the books on either side of it might be equally interesting titles you’ve never heard of. Serendipity is built into the system.

I also pay close attention to librarians’ recommendation shelves. Many libraries have a “staff picks” display, and the books on it tend to be different from what you’d find on a bestseller table in a bookstore. Librarians read widely and eclectically, and their recommendations often surface books from small publishers, translated literature, and backlist titles that deserve a second life. I’ve found some of my favorite books this way, titles that no algorithm would ever have recommended to me because they were too far outside my usual reading patterns.

Speaking of algorithms, let me address the elephant in the room. Amazon’s recommendation engine and similar systems are designed to show you books that are like the books you’ve already bought. This is useful for readers who know what they like and want more of it. It’s terrible for discovery. The algorithm optimizes for probability of purchase, not breadth of experience. It will never recommend a forty-year-old out-of-print memoir by a lighthouse keeper, because the data doesn’t support that recommendation for any significant number of users. The algorithm is a funnel. It narrows your options. If you want to find books nobody else is reading, you need to escape the funnel.

Goodreads is better than Amazon for discovery, but it has its own limitations. The most visible books on Goodreads are the ones with the most ratings and reviews, which skews heavily toward new releases from major publishers. To find the hidden gems, you need to go deeper. I follow specific Goodreads users whose taste I trust, people who read widely and review honestly, and I look at what they’re rating highly, especially titles with fewer than 500 total ratings. A book with 200 ratings and a 4.3 average is, in my experience, more likely to be genuinely special than a book with 50,000 ratings and the same average. The smaller number means the book hasn’t been discovered by the mass market, and the high rating means the people who did find it were impressed.

Curated lists are another strategy that works. Not bestseller lists, which are popularity contests, but editorial lists compiled by people with broad reading knowledge. The New York Review of Books Classics series is the gold standard for this. Their editors have spent decades identifying overlooked books from the past century and bringing them back into print with new introductions. If you haven’t explored the NYRB Classics catalog, you have hundreds of hours of extraordinary reading waiting for you. Pushkin Press does similar work for international fiction. Daunt Books in the UK has a publishing arm that specializes in rediscovering forgotten travel writing and memoirs.

Literary magazines and small journals are an underused discovery tool. Publications like The Believer, Granta, The Paris Review, and Tin House (when it was still publishing the magazine) regularly featured excerpts from forthcoming books by writers who weren’t yet well known. If you read these publications, you encounter writers at the beginning of their careers, before the bestseller lists and the major reviews and the cultural consensus that can make reading feel like homework. You also encounter international writing, experimental work, and nonfiction on unusual topics that mainstream publications wouldn’t cover.

I want to share a specific discovery method that I’ve used for years with consistent results. I call it “following the footnotes.” It works best with nonfiction but applies to fiction too. When you read a book you love, look at its bibliography, its acknowledgments, its footnotes, and its “further reading” section if it has one. These are the books that the author read while writing the book you loved. They’re the intellectual background, the sources and influences that shaped the work. And because they were chosen by a writer whose taste you already trust, they’re pre-filtered for quality.

I discovered the beekeeping essay collection I mentioned at the beginning through exactly this method. A nonfiction book I’d read about rural American economies mentioned it in a footnote. The footnote reference was brief, just a citation, but the way the author had used the source suggested it was more than dry agricultural writing. I tracked down a copy (it took some searching, since it was out of print), and it turned out to be one of the best books I’d read that year. That’s the power of following the footnotes. You’re tracing the intellectual genealogy of a book you love, and in the process, you find books that share its DNA.

Award longlists, as distinct from shortlists and winners, are another productive hunting ground. Every major literary award publishes a longlist before it narrows to a shortlist and eventually a winner. The longlist is typically ten to fifteen titles, and the ones that don’t make the shortlist often vanish from public conversation almost immediately. But they made the longlist for a reason. Someone on the judging panel thought they were among the best books of the year. These longlist-but-not-shortlist titles are where I find some of my most interesting reading. They’re good enough to be recognized by a serious award but obscure enough that most readers have never heard of them.

The international angle is worth emphasizing. If you read only English-language writers, you’re missing most of the world’s literature. Translated fiction and nonfiction, especially from languages other than the usual suspects (French, German, Spanish), contains an almost inexhaustible supply of books that nobody in the English-speaking world is reading. Literature from Arabic, Turkish, Korean, Hindi, Portuguese, and dozens of other languages is being translated into English at an increasing rate, often by small presses that don’t have the marketing budget to make their books visible. Seeking out these books requires some effort, using resources like the Best Translated Book Award longlist, the websites of publishers like Archipelago Books, Open Letter, and New Directions, and the translation-focused sections of literary magazines. But the effort pays off. Some of the most original and powerful books I’ve ever read came to me through this channel.

Independent bookstores with strong curation are another resource. Not every indie bookstore is well-curated, but the ones that are can introduce you to books you’d never find on your own. Look for stores where the staff writes hand-written recommendation cards, where the “staff picks” shelf changes regularly, and where the selection feels personal rather than algorithmic. These stores function as filters. Their buyers have read widely, and their shelf space is limited enough that everything on display represents a deliberate choice. When a bookseller at a curated shop says “you should read this,” the recommendation carries weight because it’s informed by years of reading and by an understanding of their community’s tastes. I make a point of visiting at least one unfamiliar independent bookstore whenever I travel, and I always ask the staff what they’ve been excited about lately. Their answers are rarely the same books I’d find on a bestseller list.

At ScrollWorks, we try to be part of this discovery ecosystem. When we publish a book like The Last Archive or Echoes of Iron, we know we’re competing for attention against thousands of other titles. We can’t outspend the major publishers on marketing. What we can do is produce books of such quality that readers who find them become advocates. Our best marketing is a reader who loves one of our books so much that they buy a second copy for a friend. That kind of discovery, personal and passionate and free, is how books nobody else is reading become books that everyone should be reading.

I want to mention one more strategy, and it’s the simplest. Talk to people. Talk to booksellers. Talk to librarians. Talk to the person reading on the bus. Talk to the friend who always has a book recommendation you haven’t heard before. The best book recommendations I’ve ever received came from conversations, not algorithms. A human being who knows your taste and has read something that surprised them can make a connection that no technology can replicate. They can say, “I know this sounds like it’s not your thing, but trust me.” And because you trust them, you read it. And sometimes it changes everything.

The books nobody else is reading are out there. They’re in used bookstores with cat hair on the counter. They’re in library stacks, spine-out on the bottom shelf. They’re in the footnotes of books you already love. They’re on the longlists of awards you haven’t been following. They’re being published right now, today, by small presses that can’t afford to advertise, in languages that most English-speaking readers can’t read but that translators are bringing across the border, one sentence at a time. All you have to do is look. And the looking, honestly, is half the fun. The best reading experiences of my life haven’t been the books that came to me through the usual channels, pre-chewed by the hype machine and delivered to my doorstep by an algorithm. They’ve been the books I had to work to find, the ones that felt like secrets, the ones that made me feel like the luckiest reader in the world because I’d stumbled onto something magnificent that almost nobody knew about. That feeling is available to anyone willing to put down their phone, walk into a store full of books, and start pulling things off the shelf.