An Inventory of My Bookmark Collection
In March, I worked on rearranging my home library. Last month, I followed up by taking stock of all my bookmarks. I’ve written about subsets of my bookmark collection before: ones I found in books, and ones from bookshops that have since closed. When I wrote the latter post, I estimated that I had 120–150 bookmarks. I always use a bookmark and take simple joy in finding the one that seems most appropriate to a book’s setting or subject matter when possible. Now I know, having categorized and counted them all, that my collection has grown to 228. This exercise was really for my own record and amusement, but perhaps you’ll recognize some familiar objects – or at least the hoarding impulse. Here’s a look at them all:
And here they are by category:
Bookseller-specific bookmarks. I’ve been to all of these establishments / used the online ones. Note the strong representation for Hay-on-Wye and Wigtown! (35)
Gifted. From left to right they are roughly from my mother, my aunt, my sister, my in-laws, and friends. Special mention must be made of certain ones: the puffin cross-stitch bookmark my mother made for me, and the daffodil she bought me from Sandham Memorial Chapel; the two blue-patterned ones my aunt wove on her loom (the bottom one is probably my single favourite bookmark in the whole collection and is so precious to me I once ran back to collect it from an out-of-service bus where I’d nodded off on the top deck); and a set of four paisley paper bookmarks given to me by one of my flatmates from my Master’s year at Leeds. A clever gift to bring over from India as they’re flat and extremely lightweight! (35)
Literary prizes – I generally get these from the library. It’s fun to look back at previous years’ shortlists. (25)
More bookshop and festival bookmarks, this time ones I’ve not frequented myself, which probably means I found the bookmark in a book or at a library. I’ve added five more, at bottom right, to my sad stack of bookmarks from defunct bookshops. I looked up what they’ve all become since.
- Bookends, Hay-on-Wye (two branches) is now the Oil & Oak gift shop (Castle Street) and The Pavement Palace hotel (The Pavement)
- Daunt Books, Fulham Road is now Sloane Street Auctions
- George’s is now the Bristol and Bath Rum Distillery
- Travel Books in Washington, DC is now a Mattress Warehouse
- Shoemakers, a Christian bookstore we used to have in Newbury, is now an antique shop, or vacant; I haven’t been down this alleyway in a while.
I was pleased to find that Alabaster Bookshop in New York City is still going, and the Dubray chain in Ireland is not only still around but has expanded. (22)
Other places I’ve been, events I’ve attended, or organizations I’m associated with (21)
Library-specific bookmarks, all from libraries I’ve visited and/or services I’ve used (16)
Found in secondhand or library books (15)
I collect leather bookmarks from places I’ve been. The four at bottom right I actually found abandoned in library books – although I have been to Buckfast and Westminster Abbeys! Cathy sent me the one from Seamus Heaney HomePlace and my mother bought me the one from Highclere Castle. (14)
Book-specific bookmarks that came with the book or that I picked up at Waterstones or at an event with the author. I’ve read all but the four at top right (at far right is one I found that originally came from The Persephone Book of Short Stories). (13)
Special ones: came with albums by The Bookshop Band and Anne-Marie Sanderson; I acquired for the in-your-face message (I found “Bonjour, Je veux mon livre” in the Little Free Library; it reads “Hello, I want my book” on the reverse side); are actually other objects – Target gift card, Paris botanical garden ticket, Hay Distillery business card – but I have always used as bookmarks; magnets and metal bookmarks. I’ve gotten rid of other wood/bamboo and metal bookmarks in the past as being so thick as to leave an imprint in the text block or slice page tops. (12)
Publisher-specific bookmarks; all are ones I’ve read from (10)
Do you have Opinions on bookmarks, too? Do you collect them? Where do you tend to get them from, and which are your favourites?
Sad Souvenirs: Defunct Bookshops’ Bookmarks
I’m a dedicated bookmark user and probably have at least 120–150 that I rotate through, matching marker to book subject matter or reading location whenever possible. A sorry subset of my collection commemorates bookshops (secondhand and/or new stock) that no longer exist. I was a customer at a couple of these, but only know of the others through bookmarks that I found at random, e.g. in secondhand purchases from other stores. Through Google Earth, I tracked down what you’ll find where these shops used to be.
Shops I visited:
Déjà Vu Books (Bowie, Maryland)
This was my local secondhand bookshop when I was a teenager. I would wheedle occasional visits out of my mother until my friends and I got our driving licenses and could go by ourselves. My friend Rachael and I would stop there after karate on a Saturday morning.
What I remember purchasing there: A near-complete set of Dickens’s works, blue/green cloth hardbacks, early 20th century, for $30; an Agatha Christie omnibus I gave to my mother.
What it is now: Chi Bella Natural Hair Boutique
Water Lane Book Shop (Salisbury, England)
My husband is a Hampshire lad. Salisbury was a relatively nearby town we would explore when I went to visit him while we were dating or engaged. An average daytrip would include touring the cathedral, having tea at the Polly Tearooms, and – in a waterside location just along from the cathedral square – having a nose through the well-stocked shelves of this compact shop.
What I remember purchasing there: Lots of my secondhand David Lodge paperbacks.
What it is now: A private residence (it had just sold as of Streetview in June 2018)
Others I only learned about through their orphan bookmarks:
Barnwood Books (Hagerstown, Maryland)
The bookmark looks old enough that I had to ask myself whether the shop might have been supplanted by Wonder Book & Video, a small chain I first discovered as a young teen. It has branches in Frederick (where I went to college; I worked there part-time in my senior year) and Hagerstown, and most recently opened in Gaithersburg. At the least, Wonder Book probably absorbed their stock when they closed.
What it is now: An empty storefront between a gastropub and a home fashions store (as of October 2019)
The Book Mark (Toronto, Canada)
I found this bookmark inside a secondhand book I bought from the Frederick Wonder Book & Video. I assumed the shop was still extant, but I checked in with Marcie (Buried in Print) and she sent me an article explaining that it was priced out of the neighbourhood and closed in 2012. It had been the oldest independent bookstore in Toronto. (This article gives more information.)
What it is now: Nails on Bloor, a nails and waxing parlour
Paperback Exchange (Hereford, England)
I can’t recall where I found this bookmark, but I wish a shop with this policy still existed! From the reverse: “The Paperback Exchange system: up to HALF the purchase price of books bought from us, against further purchases; up to a QUARTER on good quality paperbacks bought elsewhere.”
What it is now: On the June 2018 Streetview, it’s either the closed-down charity shop or the school uniform shop.
A nice postscript:
Royal Oak Bookshop (Front Royal, Virginia)
The bookmark I found in a used book looked so old I wasn’t sure if the shop would still exist. I was going to include it in the post as one of the defunct ones. But just to be sure, I decided to try hunting it down through the website…
Do you commemorate any deceased bookshops through their memorabilia?
Harvest Supper, Scrabble Tournament & Book Haul: A Great Trip to Bookbarn
I manage about an annual trip to Bookbarn International, one of my favorite secondhand bookshops in the UK. Apart from the stock in their newly opened Darwin Rare Books room and the 50-pence children’s books, everything in the shop is £1. I never fail to come out with a great stack of finds. Our trip on Thursday was extra special because we were going for the café’s Harvest Supper and Scrabble tournament, held as part of The Great Bath Feast.
We played one 45-minute game against another team of two, broke for an excellent vegetarian supper of squash, spinach and goat’s cheese pie with mashed potatoes and baby roast vegetables, then played a second match before dessert (vegan plum crumble with custard or gluten-free fig brownie with ice cream). Over the years my husband and I have become quite the Scrabble fiends, and together on one team I’m afraid we were unbeatable. Our bingo starting off Game #2 helped, but we worried we were at an overall advantage because the other boards each had three teams playing.
It was a special pleasure to meet William Pryor, the chairman of Bookbarn. Last year he spotted my blog posts about Bookbarn and offered me a copy of his memoir, The Survival of the Coolest. It’s a wonderful book about growing up a descendant of Charles Darwin but going off the rails and ending up addicted to heroin in his 20s:
This family of mine! On the one hand you have the royalty of science and Bloomsbury, on the other the fading world of the English landed gentry. … We had no religion but Darwin.
The months ran into each other as a blur of the chase for relief, the wheeling and dealing … One of the most striking aspects of hell is that it goes round and round; the same torments over and over again.
Mr. Pryor let me have a sneak peek at the Darwin room after the shop closed and kindly gave me a copy of his grandmother Gwen Raverat’s memoir, Period Piece. Over pudding we chatted about literary festivals, the Bookshop Band, his failed idea to return a portion of secondhand books’ resale value to the authors, and the latest Nobel Prize winner.
As to that book haul: I feel like I have fiction coming out of my ears, so with our hour of book browsing time I mainly focused on biographies and memoirs. Here are my finds:
Biographies and essays on writing biography:
Bereavement memoirs:
(Two of my purchases will go especially well as pairs with books I already own.)
Medical memoirs:
General memoirs (I was especially pleased to find the sequel to Cobwebs and Cream Teas, which I bought at Bookbarn last time and read early this year):
Plus two poetry books (one of them signed!):
And two novels I happened to grab on the way to the till:
My unexpected freebies. The Raverat is a lovely small-format hardback with gilt-edge pages and a maroon ribbon bookmark; on the right is our prize for winning the Scrabble tournament:
I’ve already had a peek inside a few of the books I bought and found some excellent passages. Leonard Woolf’s memoir opens with an extraordinary passage of almost biblical language about existence and non-existence; one of Marge Piercy’s poems struck me right away for its description of a Jewish holiday and the line “there is no justice we don’t make daily / like bread and love.”
My husband came away with three natural history books, and we also found a few children’s books to give to nieces and nephews.
Thanks to this book haul plus a trip to Book-Cycle in early September and some charity shopping last week, I’ve had to start a double stack on my biography/memoir shelves. There’s already a double stack on one of my unread fiction shelves. Next week is my birthday, so the book acquisitions are only likely to continue…
Omnibuses, Built-in Bookmarks, Deckle Edge: Book Traits I Love/Loathe
My reading has tipped more towards physical books than e-books recently, and my book acquisitions have been getting rather out of hand after some cheeky charity shopping and an influx of review copies. Plus this afternoon we’re off to Bookbarn International, one of my favorite secondhand bookstores, for an evening event – and naturally, we’ll fit in some shopping beforehand. It would be rude not to after traveling all that way.
With all this tempting reading material piling up, I’ve been thinking about some of the traits I most appreciate in books…
Omnibus editions: two to four books for the price of one. What could be better?
Built-in ribbon bookmarks: elegant as well as helpful. I also love how Peirene Press releases come with a matching paper bookmark for every three-book series.
Everything about the hardback edition of Claire Tomalin’s Dickens biography is gorgeous, in fact. I especially love the vintage illustrations on the endpapers and the half-size dustjacket.
Deckle edge is one of my special loves. For the most part it’s unique to American books (over here I’ve heard it complained about as looking “unfinished”), and always makes me think nostalgically about borrowing books from the public library in my parents’ town.
It may sound shallow, but I love these four novels almost as much for their colorful covers as for their contents. (Is it any wonder one of my favorite tags to use on Instagram is #prettycovers?) Several of these covers have raised lettering as well.
The History of Bees is one of the most attractive physical books I’ve acquired recently. The dustjacket has an embossed image; underneath it the book itself is just as striking, with a gold honeycomb pattern. There are also black-and-white bees dotted through the pages.
Colored text blocks (also called sprayed edges) are so unexpected and stylish.
And now for a few physical book traits I’m not as fond of. Perhaps my biggest pet peeve, impossible to photograph, is those matte covers that get permanent fingerprints on them no matter how gingerly you try to handle them.
I wish proof copies didn’t often come in nondescript covers that don’t give a sense of what the finished book will look like. (No ice cream cone on Narcissism for Beginners; no leaping fox on English Animals.) However, keeping in mind that I’m lucky to be reading all these books early, I mustn’t be a greedy so-and-so.
All Fitzcarraldo Editions books are paperbacks with French flaps. Another book I’m reading at the moment, As a God Might Be by Neil Griffiths (from Dodo Ink), also has French flaps. It’s not that I dislike them per se. I just wonder, what’s the point?
(See also two related posts: Books as Objects of Beauty and My (Tiny) Collection of Signed Copies.)
Okay, you opinionated book people: what are your favorite and least favorite book traits?
Marginalia, Bookmarks, Etc. Found in Books
In two of the books I currently have on the go, items found in books are a key element. First there’s Swimming Lessons in Claire Fuller, in which one strand of the narrative is told via a series of letters Ingrid hid in various thematically relevant books from her husband’s overflowing collection before she disappeared 12 years ago.
I’ve also been skimming Reading Allowed, novelist Chris Paling’s book of mildly amusing anecdotes from his time working in a public library. As little interludes he records the items he’s found being used as bookmarks in library volumes: a postcard, a shopping list, a meal plan, a CV, and so on.
In my years working in bookshops and libraries I found lots of proper bookmarks left behind in books; this photo shows the ones I’ve kept (others I’ve given away, recycled or donated to the library basket).
This doesn’t account for all the train tickets, receipts, newspaper clippings, etc. that were serving as makeshift bookmarks. The strangest thing I think I ever found in a book was an old-fashioned faux pearl-topped hatpin marking a place in a copy of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s collected poems.
And then there are the written messages I’ve found in books: other people’s bookplates (I especially like the one that appears in the front of each volume of my 1919 Chapman & Hall set of the complete works of Dickens – such an enviable reward for good attendance!);
a heartfelt message of friendship in the copy of May Sarton’s The Fur Person I got free from Book Thing of Baltimore;
a young lady’s thoughts strewn across the selected poems of Ted Hughes;
and a dead-simple recipe for a tropical fruit drink pencilled on the back cover of Patricia Volk’s memoir, Stuffed.
For me, the random objects and messages you might find are all part of the fun of buying secondhand books.
What’s the strangest thing you’ve ever found in a secondhand book?
Shirts, Totes & Other Bookish Paraphernalia
I’m a big fan of book-related paraphernalia. Even after I succumbed to e-readers in 2013, I’ve kept on hoarding bookmarks and love finding suitable pairings for my print books – a nature-related marker for a nature book; a religious-themed one for a theology book, and so on. I also collect bookmarks linked to particular bookshops or literary prizes.
Here’s a recent pairing that particularly pleased me: a novel about Vincent van Gogh with a bookmark from the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam (I haven’t been yet; I found the bookmark in a book at the library where I used to work).
There’s not much of a narrative to this post. It’s just a chance to say, here’s some great book swag! T-shirts, tote bags, pin badges, a necklace my best friend got me: you name it, I love it. It’s a wonder I don’t have more.
Bookish Beck = Rebecca Foster. American transplant to England. Freelance proofreader and book reviewer.
Bookish Beck 