Harcover lovers Issue #31

At this lit-based Web site, the only spine-tingling action comes from what’s between the pages

By Eugenia Williamson
Published: March 1st, 2007 | 12:00am

You read alone. If you spend most of your free time reading, it stands to reason that you may die alone with only your cats to mourn you. Enter Librarything.com, an online community where members catalog their libraries and post their profiles. Although it is not marketed as a dating site, in theory it would be a great venue for bookworms to connect to one another, maybe with sexy results.

Listing the 150 books permitted by my free account was pretty thrilling. Picking an appropriately literary username was similarly fun. However, when it came to meeting people, my results were a lot grimmer.

Librarything ranks your matches on a scale weighted by the number of books you have in common and their relative obscurity — a nerd’s wet dream and the perfect excuse to chat up a stranger. As I flipped through the profiles of my top matches, I found the only local male to be my dear, thoroughly homosexual friend Andy, with whom I’ve been exchanging books for years.

Inconveniently, I found a terribly cute 30-year-old in Brooklyn whose library shares 46 obscure books with my own. Similarly inconvenient is the fact that most of the men on Librarything are married and/or middle-aged.

I had written off Librarything as a device to get book recommendations (or to gauge the relative preciousness of one’s own tastes) when I stumbled across this comment on the profile of one of my matches: “Your booklist is hot. Makes me want to tear the dust jacket off a hardcover and run my finger down its spine. Or, um, read some theory.”

Perhaps a lucky few do hook up on this Web site, but that’s definitely the exception. For the rest of us, Librarything.com can only serve as an effective, cat-friendly way to waste time.