About & colophon

Kept by one person: a cataloguer by training, a reader by temperament, pseudonymous by the same logic the FAQ extends to everyone else.

History

Started in 2016 as a bookmarks file shared between three friends from a library course. Became a wiki in 2019 when the file hit four hundred lines of argument. The wiki lasted five years and two spam floods; in 2024 I flattened the whole thing into the static pages you are reading, kept the sixty-odd entries that still held up, and let the other three hundred go. Curation is mostly deletion, it turns out.

The name

"Blook" — blog plus book — was coined in the early 2000s and survived mostly as a pub-quiz answer. There was a literary prize for the form for a couple of years; it awarded money, attracted novelists pretending to be bloggers, and folded. I like the word because it's slightly embarrassing, which keeps the enterprise honest. The .network domain was what remained by the time I went looking, and I've grown into it: the shelf is a network of writers who mostly don't know they're on it.

How this is made

Hand-written HTML and one stylesheet, no generator since the 2024 move, no scripts, no fonts downloaded from anyone, no analytics. The pages weigh less than a single photograph and will render on anything made after 1996. Hosting is a small VPS that also does nothing else of interest.

Corrections

Factual errors in shelf entries — dates, spans, spellings of handles — get fixed quietly and thankfully: [email protected]. Disagreements about taste get filed under taste.