Originally Posted by 1minute
Go to AbeBooks. They can run down anything.

AbeBooks Link

A friend routed me there, and I've been reading a ton of really old stuff on our early explorers and hunters since.

+1 on AbeBooks

I've had great luck with them.

They are not a bookstore as such -- they connect to THOUSANDS of booksellers around the world! Yep, thousands, and they are better at finding really obscure books than Amazon.

I have used their "Advanced Search" to find the correct details about a book I had only a vague description of. They didn't have it, but at that point there was a way to "set an alert" -- and get an email when one of their thousands of bookstores found a copy of the book.

You can specify a particular edition, what range of conditions you would accept, paperback or hardcover, etc.

If it is a bookstore in, say, Morocco, that finds your book and not in your own country, you will often have a chance to specify fast (& expensive) shipping or slow & cheaper shipping.

In one case, I think it took nearly a year for them to get a particular book I wanted (it was from a very small press run of a very specialized scientific book), but they WILL find a copy eventually!

John