Used Book Find: 'Alone' by Richard E. Byrd

When I was very young, my mother had dragged me to the local library because she loved books. I didn't really care about books at the time, so I went up to the brand new computer they had just added and typed in the letter "A" to see what would come up. The first book on the list was "Alone," by Richard E. Byrd. I went over and grabbed it, and started reading. I couldn't stop. I checked it out of the library, and read the whole thing cover to cover in a few evenings.

Years later, I tried to remember details from the book after a conversation reminded me of it, but there were some things I couldn't remember. I went to the library to find it, but they no longer had it. I looked it up online, but couldn't find it. Amazon was fairly new at the time, and didn't have it. I couldn't remember the name "Richard Byrd" well enough to include it in my search, but I remembered it well enough to know it when I saw it. I couldn't even remember whether it took place in the Arctic or Antarctic, and I was new to searching online.

I tried searching both "alone book arctic" and "alone book antarctica," and finally found some books by other authors, and details about what had happened. The search for "alone antarctic" gave me results that showed the name "Richard Byrd, " but nothing by Richard Byrd himself. I started to think that maybe I had remembered wrong, and that the book was actually written by someone else.

I went through several pages of results, and finally found something on an obscure website for a little bookstore, but I was thrilled to see exactly what I had been searching for: the original hardback "Alone" by Richard Byrd! The bookstore was too far away, and didn't even sell online. I didn't even have the money to go get it, but I was excited just to know that I hadn't gone crazy and the book actually exists.