Tag: bookmarks

Notes on Bookmarks & My Favorite Book of the Year, “The Silver Bone,” by Andrey Kurkov

I need 3 bookmarks per book because bookmarks get lost!

I have collected  100 bookmarks over the years (but who’s counting?) since booksellers used to tuck them into every newly-purchased book. Borders was the last corporate bookstore to do so, and Amazon and Barnes & Noble stopped  years ago.

That leaves the indies.

Bookmarks often disappear.  Where?  Who knows? I find them behind the couch, on top of the buffet, and even in tea cups.  Sometimes they turn up in books we are donating to a sale!

So I have founded… Project Bookmark.   I plan to write requests to bookshops for bookmarks and enclose self-addressed envelopes with literary stamps. 

I may or my not have the energy to execute this task.

Do you think Amazon has any leftover bookmarks? I especially loved their turn-of-the-21st-century bookmarks with quotes by Cicero. 

And do recommend your favorite bookstores!

 My Favorite Novel of the Year, The Silver Bone

Note: This book is on the International Booker Prize longlist.

I highly recommend the Ukrainian writer Andrey Kurkov’s The Silver Bone, a brilliant and hugely enjoyable detective novel which, like all classic detective novels, is more than a mystery.  (Historical novel fans will equally enjoy it.)  Set in Kiev in 1919 during the Russian Revolution, the novel chronicles the chaos of war and a young detective’s investigation of a crime ring.

It begins with violence.  The hero, Samson, a young engineer, and his father are attacked by Cossacks on a mundane walk to the tailor’s. The Cossack splits his father’s head in half and cuts off Samson’s ear.  There is no reason.  They are just there.

Life is tough without his father.  Even hanging on to the flat is a challenge for Samson now that he lives alone. All over the city soldiers appropriate houses and apartments. One day two deserters pose as soldiers and raid Samson’s flat, then return to appropriate the study as their bedroom.

 Fortunately, Samson’s lopped-off ear, tucked into a box in the desk in the study, has the magical  power of transmitting the deserters’s conversation to Samson.  When they discuss killing him, he is prepared to deal with them.  And then he is hired by the police as a detective.

A beautifully-written, intelligent, and ripping good read!

It is translated by Boris Dralyuk.

The Last of the Bookmarks:  A Personal History of Marking Books

 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.

Bookmarks from online stores.

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?

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