Using Subjects

Books are about subjects. Subjects can be people or places, things, ideas, or times. Subjects can be real, like Napoleon or imagined, like Narnia. If we find a match, Open Library will automatically attach subjects to books based on the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH), and anyone who adds or edits a book can add more subjects. Subjects can also be added to authors.

Search by Subject

You can look for works related to specific subjects by visiting the Subjects page. You can also search from any page by entering "subject:" prior to your keyword or phrase in the search field at the top and bottom of any page, like "subject:Fathers and daughters" or "subject:mayors in fiction." Finally, you can also search by subject using the advanced search fields available by clicking "More search options" under the basic search field on any page and entering your query under "Subject."

The Subject Page

When viewing works about subjects on the Subject page, there's a lot of information available to you so you can explore books and subjects thoroughly.

We'll present the covers of all the works related to a Subject in Open Library in the top panel, twelve at a time. You can load more covers by using the arrow buttons to the right, and navigate covers using the same buttons. You can also flip back and forth between all books, or only those books available online to read right now (ebooks).

Below the presentation of covers, an interactive graph displaying the publishing history of works about your selected subject allows you to zoom in on specific periods or single years, and the covers panel will repopulate with the works published in your selected time period. You can reset the chart to its original scale by clicking "Show all" above the covers, or "Reset chart" above the chart.

The next section shows subjects related to the subject you're already exploring. These are provided by looking at the works related to your subject, and seeing what other subjects are related to those. You may also search within a subject, so if you're looking for a book about incunabula, maybe you want to know if it's also related to Venice, and is about the 16th century.