What's Afoot

A Sourcesite for Bibliographies and Essays

Our bibliographies are not exhaustive ones for scholars: those lists of 5000 faceless titles you can get at the universities. Rather, these are selected to give historical novelists and other fiction writers a basis in everyday life, crafts, skills, combat, arts, names, transportation, food, and other basic matters that they need to make the world of their story come to life for their readers. Fantasy and science fiction world-builders may find details in reality more fantastical than their own imaginings.

Our essays are on debatable points of history and culture, on how to get your research done right, and on details of life often not easily available in English. We hope they will fill in the holes in your picture of your characters' lives.

Our external links will take you, as often as possible, to other sourcesites, where you can read books online or at least get deeper bibliographies. We also connect you to some of the better, more thorough, more centralized linksites.

Except for illustrations with some monographs, the masthead here is the last picture you will see at this site, so that you don't have to wait for decorations to load when what you want is information.

Also, to speed loading, we are now trying to keep any one page at 30K or less, which is resulting in some divided bibliographies.

People keep writing to us asking, "But how do I get these books or pieces of information from you?" The idea of seems to be that if it is mentioned on the Web it is available right there. To ease this anxiety, we have become an affiliate of Barnes and Noble mail-order books. After several years on the Web, we have seen them to have these advantages over the competition:

• best at handling out of print and special-order books, like many of those here
• accurate on a book's status, rather than listing as out of print something in its second printing
• better in the history department, in which Barnes & Noble the publisher provides many reprints.

At the top and bottom of each page will by a search engine box. With four dozen bibliographies of 24 to 100+ books, we can't code each title for you to jump directly! Instead, you should highlight the title, copy it, and paste it into the search engine box, then click Go.

At that point you will be over at B&N, but you can use your Back button at any time to return to the bibliography, and slowly build up an order. At any time you can cancel the whole business or drop some items -- easier than doing it at the store! All you need after that is a credit card and a shipping address.

Click here if the text looks too small.

Milton E. Luckey III