“From the Archives” is a new feature I’m adding to All Hallows Geek where I’m going to start migrating some relevant content from my old site Musings for a Darkened Room over to All Hallows Geek. While much of the content is years old, I’ll be pulling things that still hav relevance to present day and might be of interest to my current audience and where possible I’ll put a modern spin on it to generate new conversation around the topic.  This Friday’s “From the Archives” will be a treat for fans and collectors of Halloween books. Over the years I have amassed a rather large collection of both children’s and adult Halloween books. While most of this collection has been built up thanks to thrift stores, my local library’s used bookstore, and Halloween shopping finds, you can also find some pretty interesting stuff online.  In this post originally published in 2010, I discovered Google Book Search as a useful tool if you’re looking for new titles to explore and even preview. Check it out!
Google Book Search A Great Resource for Halloween Books
It’s almost July, which means for us Halloween nuts it’s the start of the holiday season, and with that, I recently started a massive migration of bookmarks from Mozilla Firefox to my Delicious Halloween bookmarks (Now housed at Diigo, if you’re still interested).  With that I found a handful of new Halloween websites including the home haunt and Halloween podcast, Hauntcast (Sadly, Hauntcast went on a bit of a hiatus in 2017, but you can still visit the site and check out their archives).  I have been listening to their archive of episodes on a nightly basis and am quickly being reminded of why I love the Halloween holiday so much.  This rekindled love has had me searching for more Halloween related material on the net, which lead me to an amazing discovery.
Tonight while doing a search for Halloween goodness I stumbled upon Google’s book search.  Being a search geek and internet marketer, I have obviously always known it to be there, but never actually used it.  Tonight, however, I did a search just for shits and giggles and was amazed at the number of Halloween book offerings Google provided.
As a collector of Halloween books I was excited to find this database of books, however, it appears that the majority of the publications that turn up in the search are predominantly books published over the last 20 years. Â Google allows you to preview large portions and even some full versions of books all online.
If you’re a big fan of Halloween definitely go check out the Halloween books on Google.
In 2018 Google Book Search actually offers a number of new features you can leverage to explore your books. While still giving you previews and even some full books to explore you can select the “Tools” feature in the upper right corner of the search and actually filter your search to explore their results even further. The “document” filter lets you choose to filter by both books and magazines or one or the other. Additionally, you can filter results by date including the 19th, 20th, and 21st century or select a custom date range of your liking.
Image by Anita Dalton on Flickr
I used to love searching Google books! Definitely going to check out their Halloween offerings after reading this post!