I’ve always loved bookmarks; I’ve never felt comfortable dogearing pages or using a ripped corner of a newspaper to mark my place. Bookstores used to give away bookmarks gratis, partly to win customer loyalty, partly as advertisement, but this practice has waned in the twenty-first century. Indie bookstores valiantly manage to print out some kind of bookmark, but they are often too minuscule to be practical. Still, I keep all the bookmarks in a pencil tray, and how I manage to lose them I cannot say, but I do.
Bookmarks have been used for hundreds of years. According to the Antiquarian Books Association of America, Queen Elizabeth I was given a special fringed silk bookmark by her printer in 1584. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, ribbons were frequently bound into the books as bookmarks. I favor Everyman Library editions for the sewn-in ribbons, which remove all bookmark anxiety.
Bookmarks come in different sizes and are made of different materials, but I prefer paper. I love my tiny Book Vault bookmark, scarcely larger than a movie ticket, which proclaims, “Keep Books on Your Main Street.” Located in Oskaloosa, Iowa, in a refurbished bank on the town square, it vaunts an excellent small selection of books, with mysteries stored in the walk-in vault.
Everyone admires this vintage Amazon bookmark, which dates back to the early days of the store, perhaps 1999 or 2000, and bears a quotation from Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Tis the good reader that makes the good book.” The other two bookmarks are from The Book Depository, a wonderful online store which I was sorry to read went out of business, and Alibris, whose design gets an A+: the reflection of the colors of the logo in the colors of the reproductions of book covers is gorgeous.
The bookshops of London are generous with free bookmarks. The gold bookmark on the left is from Hatchards, the oldest bookstore in England, founded in 1797. It is so glossy and silky that I often use it, but it often slides out of my book!
On the right of the photo above and the left of the photo below is the John Sandoe Books Ltd. bookmark, with three jaunty black-and-white comic book-style squares portraying happy readers. I didn’t see a dog in the store, but this marvelous bookstore is so full of books and mysterious sliding shelves that perhaps the dog got lost or left with its owner! Or pehaps he was just a comic book dog. I do wish the shop did have a cat. Otherwise it is one of the best stores in London.
The Skoob bookmark has a simple, elegant design, backward letters on interfacing book pages, which give you the hint that Skoob is the word Books backwards. This remarkable used bookstore in a basement in Bloomsbury has a fantastic selection. Eventually you reach the point where you collapse on the floor and start reading the books! (You get to see John Sandoe Ltd again in this picture next to Skoob because I’m not Instagram!)
The two bookmarks in the photo above belong to bookstores in Iowa City, a UNESCO City of Literature. Prairie Lights, known for its books, coffeehouse, author readings, and as the store where Obama shopped during one of his campaigns, has a simple medium-sized bookmark with the classic Prairie Lights logo. The Haunted Bookshop is a used bookstore which does most of its business online since the pandemic. Its bookmark peeps out of the top of Carol Shields’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Stone Diary.
The last bookmark is for Murphy-Brookfield, a defunct used bookshop which, as the bookmark says, sold scholarly used books in the humanities. It was the best bookstore in Iowa City, and I was devastated when it went out of business. I remember rushing from the hospital where my mother had surgery to Murphy-Brookfield around the corner to buy something to read while she napped. I would have been happy to spend the afternoon browsing but duty called. I purchased a copy of Lark Rise to Candleford and a yuppieback (Vintage Contemporary Original) by Frederick Exley.
Do you use bookmarks? Or do you use bacon? That may be an urban legend, but I did hear that a librarian once found a slice of bacon tucked into a book as a bookmark.
May I just say, Ugh?
I have a shoebox full of bookmarks. Are there any you’d particularly like? I haven’t gone through them in years.
That’s so kind of you! If you want to grab a few and send them in an envelope I’d be thrilled.
Will do.
Thanks!
The novel I’m reading right now, Constance Beresford-Howe’s decades out-of-print Of This Day’s Long Journey (1947), came – used of course – with a bookmark shaped like a playing card advertising the vendor, Small Wonder Books of Rochester, New York. It’s much appreciated and will remain with the book when I’m finished as a reminder of where I found it.
For at least three years, this Montrealer used an American dollar left over from a trip to New York as a bookmark. I’m not sure what became of it, but suspect it is in a book somewhere in my collection.
There was a time, by which I mean the ‘nineties, when I received bookmarks as gifts. I think this had something to do with the rise of the big box bookstore in Canada, in which reading adjacent items were sold. More often than not, these were unusable. Two examples:
a wooden bookmark (which was at least three millimetres thick and would’ve done damage if used);
a gold-coloured metal bookmark of a design that was meant to clip onto a page (a different kind of damage).
Your post brings back so many memories, and makes me feel bad about my teenage self who would just chuck them away.
Brian, I love the idea of the playing card bookmark. I do have a book by Constance Beresford–Howe , but no such bookmark!
Hey, now I know what to do with leftover foreign money.
I used to take it for granted that every bookstore would give me a bookmark. The box store still has them, but one has to request them, because the cashiers never think of it.
I must have lost as many bookmarks as you chucked.
I
I didn’t know that Book Depository had gone. Sigh. Jeff did a bad bad thing. I used to love watching people all over the world shop for books! I got some wonderful things from there.
I know. I depended on the Book Depository on the rare instances when I wanted an English book before it was published in the U.S. The prices were very reasonable.