About a bookmark

Let’s start with some religion: which is how do you keep track of where you are in a book? If your answer is that you fold down the corner of the page you are wrong and you will burn in hell. The correct answer, of course, is that you use a bookmark.

In the past for me bookmarks were whatever bit of paper or card I had to hand but when we moved to Nairn I discovered that we have a rather fine little bookshop so I made an effort to start buying books from there rather than going to Amazon and Mavis, who ran the shop, would always offer a bookmark.

In the end it got to the point where I was refusing them as I had more than enough of them, and indeed there’s still a lot of them around the house and they're doing their job, both for me in keeping my place, and for the bookshop in reminding me that they're there and also how to contact them.

But this is not the end of things as bookmarks come from other sources too and I have a growing collection. They come into my life by various means. Some come from other bookshops. So here’s two below.

Books-on-Sea in Southend-on-Sea kindly included one of their (one sided) bookmarks when I bought those four Persephone Classics off them about which I posted before.

The navy one with the gold images and white text comes from Golden Hare Books in Edinburgh and has a very nice quote from Van Gogh on the back. I got it when I bought a copy of "Baking With Kafka", which Tom Gauld signed for me when I got to the front of the queue.

Things used as bookmarks also turn up in second hand books which where the seller hasn’t noticed is lurking there and these tell stories in themselves. Here, for example, is this delightful tiger.

I'm struggling to remember which book it fell out of it but it wasn't a children's book so perhaps Violet's parent stole it to use as a bookmark. I'm also intrigued as to why the party was being held at Maria's and not at Vivienne's house.

And then there’s the postcard which came inside my copy of “On the Other Side: Letters to my Children from Germany 1940–46” by Mathilde Wolff-Mönckeberg which I mention in my first post and which I picked up on eBay.

This one was clearly given to Claire by John, presumably with a cookbook. I thought I had a book problem but John had “a collection of over 1,000 of them”. Judging by this post by Penguin I think this is the John Hamilton who used to be art director at Penguin Books - hence his writing that "this book of postcards represents 100 of the best". He died in 2019, aged on 55.

Finally there’s my latest discovery, the aforementioned Persephone Books. Every book in their standard range comes with a bookmark to match the end papers and if you look back at my post you can see there the bookmark that came with "Few Eggs and No Oranges".

I love them all and they're all part the great reading experience and, to remind you, that means that there is no excuse for folding down the corner of a page.