In my posting on the shoplifting of books, I used booklifting as a portmanteau of shoplifting and book. I’m not the first person to use the word booklifting for theft. Here’s another occurrence:
The vendors couldn’t keep an eye on each of us as we stormed down the bookstore aisles like schoolgirls on a fun fair. It was an ordinary stealing foray. We were good. Synchronised booklifting, we’d invented the art. (link)
It’s not clear that such examples have portmanteaus. Booklifting could just be a synthetic compound based on the verb lift ‘steal’ (a slang use attested since the 16th century); after all, shoplifting is itself such a compound (attested since the late 17th century, with a backformed verb to shoplift developed later). And there are examples that look pretty clearly like synthetic compounds (not directly involving shoplifting):
A student in Kenya has turned to the BBC to help investigate the problem of continued theft of books from the country’s libraries. Ruben Gitahi asked BBC World Service’s Outlook programme to look into the practice of “booklifting” – which he said was becoming “rampant” in the country’s cities. (link)
And also examples of booklifting ‘raising books into the air’:
So today I took took 200+ books, and moved them off of shelves, and replaced them with (probably over) 200 more and then brought 150 of the former to Goodwill. I get my muscles from booklifting thank you very much. (link)
Back to booklifting ‘stealing books’. Predictably, I suppose, a back-formed verb to booklift has developed:
Have you ever booklifted? (link)
(This is a badly scanned text, but this part of it seems clear, and it’s about stealing books from a library.)
Meanwhile, there are various uses of a noun booklift: for a device for lifting books, for a device for holding copy up, and for shipping books to institutions in need.
And in investigating lift ‘steal’, I came across the slang verb boost with a similar sense (OED2: ‘To steal, esp. to shoplift; to rob’; originally U.S., and attested from the early 20th century).
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