Biblioklept is twenty years old today

Posted on by Biblioklept

Biblioklept is twenty years old today.

I was 27 when I started the blog which I guess means I’m 47 now. The blog is older than both of my children (it is almost exactly nine months older than my oldest child).

More data:

I published 167 posts between 9 Sept. 2006 and 9 Sept. 2007, Biblioklept’s inaugural year. This was right around the time blogging went fully mainstream and right before social media platforms started to sink their claws into the zeitgeist. Two friends of mine had started blogs and they both independently suggested I start one, so I did. The early years of this blog are littered with posts referencing their blogs and other blogs, blogs long since defunct. One of those friends is now dead. The other friend I am no longer friends with for reasons I actually can’t even fully remember. 

Not sure of what to post for Biblioklept’s vigintennial, I spent an afternoon this weekend browsing through that first year of posts. Biblioklept was initially, ostensibly, a blog about books I had procured, pocketed, pinched, and purloined. I described outright thefts along with tomes I never returned. I also wrote about books that people “borrowed” and never gave back to me (including many, many students). I eventually took up writing, or trying to write, real “reviews” of books. Biblioklept barely had an audience the first few months, but by the end of the year the readership had grown, in large part thanks to these longer reviews, and also, I think, because of a general brattiness to the site. I was 27, like I said; I felt much older than the millennial Brooklyn hipsters all my friends lived among far North from my Florida, and I was much younger than the established literary voices that had segued from the print into the digital world. My takes on books and film and music were often uncharitable, snotty, uninformed, or just plain mean-spirited. Perhaps more cringeworthy to me are novels and films I heaped undue praise upon. I could link to lots of specific examples, but I won’t.

Scrolling through posts from 9 Sept. 2006 to 9 Sept. 2007, I was struck by a few things — how loose and chaotic the blog was, how free it seemed, how clearly aimed at an audience of maybe 10, 15 people, and how very very very angry I was all the time. A searing hatred of the Bush regime comes through in those early posts; early Biblioklept is soaked in the post-9/11 zeitgeist. Too, those early posts emanate a strange, subtle, and unacknowledged anxiety about what I might now call early millennial (or Millennial if you prefer) hipster culture. Maybe I was afraid of losing my edge to the art-school Brooklynites in little jackets with their borrowed nostalgia (I actually remembered the eighties).

As far as I can tell, I didn’t receive any review copies or advance reader copies until around November of 2007. In just a few short years it became impossible to keep up with all the books that came in. By 2010 the audience for the blog had dramatically expanded (even as blog readership on the whole declined). I was able to monetize the blog via the WordPress ads program, but I eventually abandoned that commercial practice.

I was also posting a lot more. More unasked-for data: I published 2409 posts between 9 Sept. 2013 and 9 Sept. 2014. That’s too many posts! I picked that year — call it 2014 — because I’d say that was the last little gasp of the blogosphere’s cultural relevance. Blogs still exist, sure, but they are institutional, professional, and (to employ a term that will read as very mid-twenties ten years from now), niche.

I hope that Biblioklept is still a niche blog, dedicated loosely to art and reading and books, particularly oddballish literature. But as far as the biblioklept niche: I have of course long since run out of book theft stories to tell because I haven’t stolen a book in decades.

That last sentence is a lie; I took a small tract from a house I was renting on Anacapri in June last year, an Italian translation of Alexandre Dumas’ Capri. I would like to say I took it with the intention of returning it one day. I left a deposit, one of the two physical books I took with me to Italy that summer. The theft in question, Capri, is pictured below, nestled in a new old bookcase my father-in-law told me to take.

The Dumas is posed here; its natural place in the house is in a cache of small flat tracts I store horizontally in a box in a bundle. The books it sits among are seeking shelves, or reviews, or simply my tired reading eyes. They are recent acquisitions, books to be read, and occasional redundancies. They occupy roughly one sixth of the shelf’s apparent volume; more if I double stack. I’ll try to go about filling the case slowly in this next year, 9 Sept. 2026 through 9 Sept. 2027.

I will also probably post more slowly, or more sparingly, or more sporadically (I’ll find an adverb that fits). More data (last, I promise): I published about 300 posts in the last year (9 Sept. 2025-9 Sept. 2026). I think I can deflate a bit, no? Aim for something closer to that inaugural run of just over 150 posts. Let things wind down. I’ve carved this niche and I’m comfortable in it, but I can’t go on with this thing forever. Can I?

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Published by Biblioklept

34 thoughts on “Biblioklept is twenty years old today”

  1. Thank you for this blog. I have followed it for at least a decade now. Initially because of Bolano and McCarthy, and now for all of the other new books I have discovered. Here’s to another decade or two!

    Liked by 1 person

  3. Perhaps I’m being, I don’t know, selfish? But I hope Biblioklept goes on forever. I read it all and I love much of it. Thank you for many years of book recommendations, reviews, thoughts, and everything in-between.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. Me too! I only discovered you a few years ago (I can’t remember where) but I don’t miss a day and frequently repost (with attribution of course). No quitting allowed!!

      Liked by 1 person

  4. Thanks for everything you’ve posted. Been reading you for at least a decade if not longer. You’ve turned me on to so many books and authors I might never have heard of otherwise.

    Liked by 1 person

  8. I’ve been reading this blog for at least ten years. I remember when I first found it: I was at the British Library, browsing for stuff about Vollmann, and I bumped into your review of the Critical Companion. I have been checking the blog almost daily since then. I love the way you write about books, and while my personal reading taste has somewhat shifted over the last decade, I keep reading it and learning a lot. I really hope it will last for another twenty years. Frankly, in these horrible times, it is nice to have a niche to return to.

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  9. Happy anniversary! I’ve been reading for about 5 to 6 years now, and I’m always happy when I receive an email. I use an RSS-to-email script. I think it was Suttree that brought me here.

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  10. I started reading biblioklept when I was around 18 or 19, so I guess that means I’ve been following along for about 18 of those 20 years. I’d like to think I was the one who found your blog, probably through something DFW related- his writing was a big part of my late teens/early twenties. But maybe not, maybe a no-longer-friend showed me your site- we were always childishly competing to see who had read the more interesting or obscure or bigger book. Or maybe I found your blog through searching up literary theft. In high school I tried to start a book club where you were only allowed in after stealing from the local chain book store- no one joined. Either way, I’ve kept up with your posts almost daily- even when I wasn’t reading so much in my twenties. Sometimes I’ll stumble across an interesting looking book I know nothing about and immediately search your site to see if you’ve already written about it. I’m rarely disappointed. Just last week, I found Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet at a Goodwill and, lo, you had written about it back in 2022.

    Anyway, I guess I’m kind of rambling but I only wanted to say that your blog has been very meaningful to me. It’s nice that this little part of the internet stayed exactly the same. I will be sad when it’s no longer here.

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  11. Thank you for this bloc. Been checking in here for many years. It’s been a light in the dark for me many times. Do what you need to do, but your work is appreciated here.

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  12. I can’t remember how many years I’ve been reading your blog but it’s the only one that I get an email from whenever you post. Always excited to get those emails and have read many books that you have recommended. I wish I wasn’t such a slow reader.

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  14. Have been reading this blog for 10 – 15 years. I hope it keeps on truckin! It’s turned me on to so many different writers and artists. Thanks for all your generosity!

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  15. CONGRATULATIONS, MANY THANKS, AND MUCH RESPECT FOR TWO DECADES WELL SPENT! It’s an honor to have played a role in your “superhero origin story,” and an absolute pleasure to have witnessed you evolve as a writer and thinker over the years. I don’t think of you, primarily, as a “critic” — rather, an Enthusiast. Biblioklept provides the expertise and precision of serious scholarship, and the passionate DiY energy of a zine. You remain a terrific influence on how I think about the arts, and how I think-about-thinking. Biblioklept has been the source of countless “wow” moments, and many stimulating conversations. I hereby, happily, join the chorus of “TWENTY MORE YEARS!”

    Cheers (strictly espresso)!

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  16. Been a busy month, so I’m just now clearing the cache — CONGRATS — I like anniversaries. Knowing how time passes for people I admire or who intrigue me makes me feel visible. And it’s fun to learn a little about the book-guy behind the curtain. Every so often I recommend / fwd you to someone, and they almost always write back, glad to know about your scribing… Take care. and Thanks.

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