This weblog started out as a personal blog called Battery Changer Charger Gumbo with some inane personal posts and horrible aesthetics. It was truly ugly and it lay dormant with few posts for some time. Meanwhile, after buying books and starting them only to realize that I had already read them I decided to write short reviews on Goodreads, a few sentences to help me remember the book. At some point I discovered that on Goodreads you can publish your review to your blog and it worked pretty well with Battery Changer Charger Gumbo. This is why so many of the links here point back to Goodreads. Anyway, I figured that it might be a good thing to share my short reviews so I changed the focus of the blog to book reviews, and changed the name to Mostly Old Books and Rust. The story behind the name is that growing up in the Motor City there were derogatory phrases made up using acronyms of auto manufacturers, FORD was Fix Or Repair Daily, Chrysler was known as MOPAR or Mostly Old Parts and Rust. The blog still looked horrid, with ugly green colors and nasty backgrounds so I played with the Blogger templates, pieced together a nice background from book images, and adjusted the colors to be more rust-like, lots of reds and oranges. Eventually I got to the point where I really liked that way that it looked and it's been stable for quite some time now. I would have never guessed that my dopey blog would evolve into a book review site that gets thousands of hits per month. Pretty cool.
Update: Mostly Old Books and Rust now presents reviews from writer and book reviewer Steven J. McDermott as the blog continues to focus more on book reviews.
