New Books

Those interested in The American West may reasonably be assumed to also have some interest in books about The American West.

There are many places on the internet that sell new books, but if you run any reasonable number of random samples through a price-comparison service, you will reliably find that for new books Amazon Books delivers the lowest price in the great majority of cases. Moreover, Amazon has free delivery with any order of new books above a reasonable minimum, and you can "save up" book orders till your total reaches that minumum. For new books, Amazon is the obvious choice.

(Click on the image above to see a message from Amazon.)

New Books About The American West

While we have a general Amazon book-search facility that we will discuss more in a moment (and it's better than Amazon's own), let's talk first about the subject of this site: The American West. Our software goes out every night and, through a special data interface, queries Amazon for all books it carries related to "The American West", which is normally a very great many titles. That software then combs through that vast horde of listings and discards the ones (typically a large majority) that are not really available right then (Amazon continues to list many books that have gone unavailable); the software then lists the truly available The American West books on a set of web pages here.

Today, we have 989 books on The American West that you can read about and conveniently one-click buy from right here, right now, through Amazon U.S.A..

(We do not ourselves categorize these titles: they are what Amazon returns for the search phrase "The American West". Amazon often includes in its results a few books that seem to bear little relation to the search phrase--sometimes to the point of being amusing--but the vast majority in these lists are "on point".)

Here's how you can see all those titles:

There are two lists. The one most easily used is a set of 27 pages (one for each letter of the alphabet, and one for titles that begin with something other than a letter). Books are listed on those pages by the first word of their title, except for titles beginning with A, An, or The, which are listed by their second word.

The second list is a single "master list"--everything on one page--of all of the numerous "The American West" books available. It is a long page (and may take a while to load if you have a slow internet connection), and it is straight text, not web text like the other lists. Its purpose is to allow you to search in one place for titles containing, but not starting with, some word or phrase, or for particular authors. You can search the page on line, with your browser's Search facility, or you can download the page and use any text editor to examine it.

(All modern browsers can directly display this master file, which is in a special compressed form; if yours cannot, you can download the file and then "gunzip" it; but if that's your case, look at the nice click-on bar at the very bottom of this page and get your free Firefox browser.)

A typical entry on one of the alphabetical set of book-title pages might look like this:

That's all pretty simple and self-evident: the book's title, which is a click-on link; the book's author; the "medium"; the publication date and publisher; the Amazon price to you and best current shipping estimate; and a link to an Abebooks search (of which more in a moment, under Used Books) for used copies of the same title.

To see the page you'd get if you clicked on the title, well, click on the title (that sample above works). Before you do, though, let us note that the page you go to will have more or less the same information--only updated the instant you click, so you can be sure the price and availability are exactly up to the minute--plus a really large image of the book's cover (if Amazon has an image, which it usually but not always does), information on whether the book qualifies toward the free-shipping minimum (and a link to more information on Amazon's free-shipping policies), and a one-click button that will put the book in your Amazon "Shopping Cart" (or let you create a Cart if you are one of those ever-fewer folk who haven't bought from Amazon before). Plus: that page will also have all editorial and reader reviews of the book that Amazon has (and the reader reviews are listed in the order that other readers have voted them "useful").

(Those links will bring up new browser windows--just close them when you're through looking and this page will still be here.)

A last thought: don't be afraid to add books to your Shopping Cart. You haven't actually bought any books till you go through Amazon's checkout procedure. Till you do, you can add other items to your cart or remove any items already in it (you use Amazon's pages to do those things).

A Few Special Book Recommendations

We list here a few books of especial value to both visitors and Washingtonians planning on travelling by car in our state.

• A Traveler's History of Washington; Bill Gulick; Paperback; $19.95; with nearly 200 photographs, an excellent index and bibliography, and divided into six parts (for the state's regions), each with handy maps maps and mileage charts.
  
  
• Exploring Washington's Past: A Road Guide to History; Ruth Kirk, Carmela Alexander; Paperback; $19.29; a travel guide focusing on historical sites with sections on various regions describing local history--has entries on towns and sites with information on their festivals, museums, and historic districts.
  
  
• Washington State Place Names: From Alki to Yelm; Doug Brokenshire; Paperback; $14.95; A lighthearted yet factual guide for both travelers and locals.
  
  

New Books on Other Subjects

We make it easy for you to locate books on The American West, but you are not limited to such books. After all, Amazon sells pretty much every single title actually in print!

You could, of course, visit Amazon own pages and use their search to locate books. But experienced internet book buyers know that Amazon's searches are imperfect in several ways: they usually don't return all available editions on the first pass, they commonly return all sorts of "non-books" (calendars, post cards, and suchlike junk), and nowadays their "internal search" returns ridiculously long sets of results from which it is hard to find actual books you want. And they clutter up your screen with all sorts of peripheral "information" (read ads) not much related to what you are searching for.

This site has a book-search page for Amazon that is similar to but, many feel, much better than Amazon's own. While our page is simple and intuitive to use, it nonetheless has an extensive introduction that points out some Amazon "gotchas" and various ways to improve your search experience. But, even if you read all of that long introduction, you'll only need to go through it once; thereafter, when you visit that search page (we hope you'll bookmark it and use it as your regular new-book shopping tool) you can use the "jump to box" link atop the page to get right to the search box (or you can just bookmark the box once you've jumped to it). If you want, you can visit and test our Amazon book-search page right now--the page will open in a separate browser window, so this page will still be here when you're through looking there.

Each result turned up by our searches is roughly similar to the one of the The American West-book listings on our alphabetical pages (except that it also shows a small image of the cover, something we don't do on our book-list pages because otherwise they'd take forever to load). When you click on any of the results, you'll be taken to a page exactly like the pages you get to from our lists, which you have probably already seen. They are, like the search-results pages themselves, clean, neat, simple, and easy to look over, unlike the ad-jammed pages Amazon sends you.

Our search, like our The American West-book lists, defaults to showing you only real books that are really available--but you can very easily change those defaults if you want to see unavailable items (for information purposes) or are interested in related goods (what the trade calls "nonbooks").

Used Books

If, instead of books available new, you are interested--whether for price or availability reasons--in used books, of any kind (The American West or other, that is), we have a nice, simple used-book search page for you; it searches the listings on Abebooks, a listing service with a really huge number of internet used-book-selling members--virtually all internet used-book sellers are Abebooks-listed, from the big guys down to most mom'n'pop operations. If you want, you can visit and test our used-book search page right now--the page will open in a separate browser window, so this page will still be here when you're through looking there.

Like the new-book search, this is a very simple, easy-to-use search facility.

All The "The American West"-Book Pages

· "The American West" Books Available New Today:

     By Title:
      A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z | numerals etc.

     The "The American West"-Books "Master List" (large textfile for special searching)

· Search for Any New Book at Any Amazon National Division

· Search for Any Used Book at Abebooks