Urban Outfitters literature

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Luke Winkie on a strange period in 2000s culture—when a popular Tumblr could become a coffee table book. 

Hipster Puppies, a Tumblr operated between 2010 and 2012 by the prolific music critic Christopher Weingarten, was proudly mercenary. The conceit was either cynical or brilliant, depending on the way you look at it. Weingarten set out to exploit the precise contours of Obama-era millennial taste; he wanted to go viral with as little effort as possible. So every day, on his Tumblr, Weingarten posted photos of dogs dressed in tortoise shell glasses, or wintry cardigans, or some other aesthetic designator of late-aughts hipsterdom, alongside a pithy description of their lifestyle bona fides. ("Beans describes his senior project as a cross between Bergman and Evil Dead II," reads one, underneath an image of a dog wearing a scarf.) Hipster Puppies appeared on the internet in the midst of a publishing feeding frenzy for fashionable Tumblrs, and Weingarten played his cards perfectly. Within a year, the blog had completed its prime directive. Weingarten signed a book deal, and brought Hipster Puppies hardcovers to twee gift shops around the world.

"It was my parody for how easy it is to get people's attention," says Weingarten. "And then it ended up getting people's attention. I didn't think those Tumblr books were very funny, or very good, so I thought, 'Why can't that be me?'"

Hipster Puppies, like so many popular-Tumblrs-cum-coffee-table-books, was pugnaciously light on content. Its glossy pages contained a gallery of the same sort of pictures that Weingarten posted on his blog—millennial-coded dogs—with hardly any reading getting in the way. This was par for the course. If you came of age in the early 2010s, you likely remember a ton of books exactly like Hipster Puppies paneling the halls of Urban Outfitters, or Paper Source, or the impulse-purchase aisles of Barnes & Noble. 

HIPSTERDOM

BOOKWORMS

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