Musings of a Reader

The Bookmark

When you're reading a book, it does you good to save your place when you have to walk away so you can come back to it later. Some people dog-ear their pages. Some people use a scrap of paper. Some people lie the book flat open. Most, but not all, choose to use a bookmark.

There's some hot debate when you bring up how you save your place in a book. Some people consider it sacrilegious to dog-ear the page or lay your book flat or use anything out of the ordinary to mark the spot. If you don't have a functional bookmark, almost anything will do the trick. A sock. A receipt. A post-it note. A leaf. A string. I've even seen people use whatever they're eating to hold their spot. My suggestion to those people, though, is to take out your sandwich bread before returning it to the library. I've heard librarians are not so happy to find pieces of moldy food in between the pages of book.

You might not have known this, but the earliest existing bookmark was actually an ornamented piece of vellum on a leather strip attached to a book in the 6th century AD. The book, you ask? A copy of Coptic Codex, which can be seen in the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin. Although, studies say that bookmarks were in use long before that. It wasn't really until the mid-1800's that standalone bookmarks were being manufactured in Europe. Normally, a book would have a ribbon or strip of leather to keep the place, but now people started making separate markers. Nowadays, you can find bookmarks anywhere. Bookstores, markets and museums are some of the best places to find them. Individual artists also sell their work at fairs and online. Some people even collect bookmarks.

To say that I collect bookmarks is false, but I do not deny that I have over 50 of them. I keep them in an old shoe box so I can rifle through and find one that suits whatever book I'm reading. Being a perfectionist sometimes, I like finding one with similar colors to my book or themed the same. And I often find myself browsing advertisements online for fun bookmarks made of paper, cardboard, metal, leather and even wood. Alright, so saying I don't collect them might be a lie.

There's a great selection of bookmarks out there. There's the classic, paper or cardboard bookmark with a picture or design on one side. You can buy magnetic bookmarks that you can clip on to your page. There's one of folded origami or cloth in the shape of a triangle that you can snugly fit on to the corner of your book page. You may find cloth embroidered ones, wood-cutting ones, thin metal work or a long piece of flat metal that you place in between the pages and the top of it will curve over the spine of your book and might have beads or trinkets hanging down. I've made a couple of these myself.

Sometimes you don't always have a "traditional" bookmark, though. People have been known to fold over pages to keep their spots, memorize the page numbers, stick a spare piece of paper in there or anything they can find. I always figure, if it's your book you can do whatever you want with it. Although, if it's not your book, then you should show a bit of respect and make sure however you mark your place is nondestructive to it. Other than that, happy reading!