This blog was born of the fact that I am a bibliophile. Ever since I was a child, I have loved to read. This site has been low on book reviews of late, however. That isn't because I'm not reading. It's because I'm reading about a particular topic to the exclusion of all else in preparation for a class I'll be teaching in the upcoming school year. I pondered reviewing the books here and decided that posting numerous reviews of scholarly books on the history of Florida is a surefire way to run off the few readers I have left.

As I contemplated the irony of a bibliophile's book review blog with very few reviews, I began wondering about interesting words that define various aspects of being a booklover. There are actually three that I'd never heard of, so I thought I'd share them here.

Abibliophobia: The fear of running out of things to read.

This word had to have been evolved before the advent of mass printing. I have never feared running out of things to read. On the contrary, if I have a fear at all in this regard, it's more in the vein of, "I'll never be able to read all the things I want to read before I die!"

Biblioklept: A person who steals books

This one made me chuckle. Unless it's a rare or expensive book that can be sold for profit, are there any people in our current culture whose preferred version of kleptomania is books? Very Interesting! Lastly, but certainly not least, we have:

Bibliopole: A person who buys and sells books, especially rare ones.

I like this one. One of the things we have done from time to time is look at online calssified sites for books. On more than one occasion, there are people selling very old books that belong to their parents or grandparents. It's a fun excursion.

Do you have any bookish words to share? Please do so!