Happy Birthday!

by

Lauren Roberts

We’re one year old!

One year ago this week, on January 8, 2006, BiblioBuffet debuted with five writers and six columns. Today, we have  eight writers and seven columns, which is more of a change that it initially appears—one of our early contributors left, and four new ones joined us.

It’s been an exciting year with enough trauma, worry and thrills to give me a few gray hairs, but there’s very little I’d change even if I could. The best part is having created something that has attracted a lot of attention, respect and the participation of people who leave me in awe. At times I feel like a representation of the business maxim that a smart executive hires people smarter than herself.

The smart thing I did was to take a personal vision and endow it with life. As I said in my first “Reviews & Reflections” column: There’s something about the book that lends itself to any place, any season, any time, any accompaniment because reading is—and always has been—more than the physical act of perusing words. It is a world of fingertips caressing paper, of eyes savoring the impression of black ink on white or cream paper, and of a mind meeting another in a format that cements that melding rather than dividing it. That world is a poignant one filled with the beauty of physical sensations and mental auras. Batteries not needed.

To read is to be soothed; to be taken away to a distant time and land; it is to feel aroused, amused, intrigued, angered; to be held captive by threads of language strung together in a perfect weave; it is to be emotionally taken apart and put back together.

I believed that then, and I believe it now. I view books as sources of wonder, of knowledge, of exposure to things, times, places, experiences and people that might otherwise remain unknown to me. And I was determined that BiblioBuffet would become a resource for others who share those views to find excellent books.

Since I had never done anything like it before ( or dealt with online development), my first step was working with a web master. Henry Marx came forward, the perfect person for a job that required good technical skills and nonstop patience. It took months to mesh our working and communication styles, but we can now laugh about the times each of us came close to walking out on the project.

Finding the name,  BiblioBuffet, was rather a hoot. I knew it needed to include either “books” or “biblio,” but beyond that I was stumped—even more so after trying every “b” word I could think of that would make a good combination with one of them. “It has to be a dot com,” was drilled repeatedly into my head. Unfortunately, dot com names have been culled ruthlessly, and every name I came up with had either been taken or was ridiculously stupid (BookBreast anyone?). In desperation, I hit on the idea of going through the dictionary looking at each “b” word. (Did you know there are approximately 110 “b” words per page and 152 pages for that letter in Webster’s Third New International Dictionary? There are. Still, it was worth it because I found what I consider to be the ideal name.)

With the domain name in hand, I set out to see what was already out there. Quite a lot as it turned out. I spent several weeks perusing other sites from the respected Bookslut and Complete Review to ones that made my eyes bleed and my red pen itch. I looked at thousands of fonts, hundreds of web site templates, and  god-knows-how-many images. I bought Photoshop and reacquainted myself with it. I bought a scanner and learned to use it. I hired an intellectual property attorney, and began the process of  trademarking the name and motto. And I did all this while holding down a full-time job, working with the web designer and securing contributors.   

Those contributors turned out to be the biggest joy and greatest source of pride for me about this site. A year later I am still astounded at the immense talent each of them brings that gives BiblioBuffet its reputation for “writing worth reading.”

I met Nicki Leone of “A Reading Life” online when she posted that the independent bookstore she managed was being closed. It wasn’t more than five minutes after I read it that I contacted her and asked her to write for us. When she said yes, I actually danced around my living room. Nicki is a reader’s reader. I have watched, amazed, as she has moved in her columns from poetry to mysteries, from “uncomfortable” reading to reminiscing about  her childhood library, from voyeurism to overstuffed bookshelves. The woman has very few limits on what she reads, and I find myself adding titles to my to-buy list nearly every time she writes a new column.

Anne Michael is unusual in several ways. Like all contributors she is a voracious reader, but unlike the others she was new to writing on a weekly deadline when I asked her. We had become friends when we were co-moderators at a writers’ web site earlier, and I liked her and her offbeat sense of humor and wacky ways of looking at the world. My faith in her proved correct. She has been a perfect contributor, and her sense of the absurd has made her columns unique to a book site. Humor is hard to do (I’ve been notably unsuccessful at it), but she does it so well that I have come to think of her as a literary Erma Bombeck—only better.

Daniel M. Jaffe’s reach into the world of authors and playwrights has brought a range of fascinating people to BiblioBuffet. I am especially proud of this not only because his interviews are more like conversations between literary colleagues, but because he consistently finds writers of  extraordinary quality who possess interesting thoughts on their art. It is little wonder to me that Dan was recently named Best Online Instructor in the well-regarded UCLA Extension Writers’  Program. He knows how to bring out the best in the best.

It took me months to persuade Laine Farley, co-writer of “On Marking Books” to come aboard. Not because she was leery of BiblioBuffet, but because she had her own blog on bookmarks. In fact, that’s how I found her. I liked her passion for the subject, and her writing. I knew she’d be perfect. Still, she carefully eluded my reach pleading excess work until at last I think I wore her down. She has been a delight to work with and to know. I adore her writing, and her columns always provide new information on one of the smallest—but most interesting—collecting fields around. Her piece, The Legend of the Bacon Bookmark, is a classic.

Henry Carrigan actually found me. More specifically, he found Nicki Leone, read one of her pieces that was linked elsewhere and followed it to BiblioBuffet. When he inquired about writing for the site and included his credentials, I nearly fell over. Then I grabbed him. Henry’s remarkable background in literature, editorial and reviewing has endowed him with a brilliant eye for fine writing and a strong sense of how to convey that. He writes what he loves, and he loves what he writes. There is no better description of a top-notch reviewer. Right now he is in the midst of a fabulous career change, which will be announced in his bio next week.     

Some people change e-mail addresses the way they change clothes. Fortunately for BiblioBuffet, Frank X. Roberts isn’t one of them. If he was, I might never have found him. Around July of last year, Laine e-mailed me about this guy she remembered who also collected bookmarks. The organization he had been connected with did not show him on their current books, but she was able to dig out an old e-mail address—and it worked! As it turned out, Frank had written a book on bookmarks, but the potential publisher felt the audience would be too small and decided against publishing it at that time. Their loss. I love having Frank as part of our threesome who share “On Marking Books” because his knowledge of their history, especially of medieval ones, is absolutely astounding.  

Our newest contributor, Gary Baldridge started only this week with “Feasting on Poetry & Prose.” I am quite excited about his column with its focus on (among other things) fine poetry and classical literature, especially French. Like Henry, Gary came to BiblioBuffet. (How I’m not yet sure; in the midst of the background work that a new contributor necessitates, I forgot to ask him.) Poetry is one of the most neglected forms of reading today, and his concentration on it means that our readers will have an opportunity to learn about the best of today’s (and yesterday’s) poetic offerings.

Given the number of web sites (which must be in the billions by now) it can be difficult to get attention paid to a new one. BiblioBuffet has been fortunate in that many people, some of them prominent in their fields, have given us their support. I try to keep up with them by listing them on the Acknowledgements page, but I will admit to being a bit behind at the moment. Nevertheless, I am especially grateful to Miss Snark (probably the best known literary agent on the planet even if she operates her blog under a pseudonym); Writer Beware (one of the top scam-fighting organizations and a godsend for writers); and Preditors & Editors™ (another top scam-fighting site that maintains a list of highly recommended, recommended, not recommended and strongly not recommended agents, publishers, publications and more).

It truly has been an wonderful year, a dream come true. Creating a high-quality literary site where readers can find honest opinions on books worth their time, enjoy  superb writing about book festivals, bookmarks, censorship and any other number of book-related topics, meet writers and playwrights they might not otherwise get to know, and enjoy an ad-free beautiful online publication is a joy and a blessing.  

Thank you for joining us. We hope you enjoy our second year.  


Almost since her childhood days of Mother Goose, Lauren has been giving her opinion on books to anyone who will listen. That “talent” eventually took her out of magazine writing and into book reviewing in 2000 for an online review site where she cut her teeth (as well as a few authors). Stints as book editor for her local newspaper and contributing editor to Booklist and Bookmarks magazines have reinforced her belief that she has interesting things to say about books. Lauren shares her home with several significant others including three cats, 750 bookmarks and nearly 1,000 books that, whether previously read or not, constitute her to-be-read stack. She can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it