This past
weekend I read a mystery novel, as usual, but it was a Kindle book on my iPad
so I didn’t need a bookmark. If I had been reading a book of the dead-tree
variety, however, it’s good to know that I would have had a wide range of
bookmarks to choose from. Boy, would it have been a wide range.
A lot of
readers, I know, don’t bother with formal bookmarks. They use grocery receipts,
business cards, dollar bills — whatever is at hand. I’ve heard stories of
people buying a book at a secondhand bookstore and finding, when they opened
it, a large bill inside that had been used as a bookmark. You don’t get that on
Kindle.
I, on the
other hand, belong to the group of people who collect bookmarks and who look at
them as part and parcel of their reading history. Toward that end, I recently
took an inventory of my bookmark collection.
Memories of Bookstores Past
The great
majority of my bookmarks come from bookstores that give them away as
advertising when a customer buys a book. As might be expected, I have a ton of
bookmarks from the local bookstores where I regularly shop. That includes Bookshop
Santa Cruz, the recently closed Crossroads Books in Watsonville, and River
House Books in Carmel.
A few of my
bookmarks aren’t from bookstores at all. I have one my sister sent me for a
literary magazine that published one of her poems and another from some sort of
online organization that claims to connect writers and independent bookstores.
And I have a bookmark from Gayle’s Bakery in Capitola, where I have never
bought or read a book, but have purchased far more breakfast treats than are
probably good for me.
And I have
a few bookmarks from stores I’ve visited in the past that no longer exist.
There’s one from The Book Keeper in West Yellowstone MT (which I last visited
in 1989) Toyon Books in Healdsburg CA, Phileas Fogg’s Travel Books in Palo Alto,
and Borders, which failed to outlast the local bookstores that were so
terrified of it.
Ah, The Places I’ve Been!
I even have
a couple of bookmarks from stores I’ve never been to, including City Lights in
San Francisco and Stinson Beach Books, just north of the City. Those turned up
in secondhand books I bought elsewhere. Not as good a find as a $20 bill, but a
find nevertheless.
Of the
bookmarks that reflect my travels (and purchases), I come across the following:
Ravenna Third Place Books in Seattle, Bart’s Books in Ojai CA, Point Reyes
Books, The Book Den in Santa Barbara, Gallery Books in Mendocino Twice Told
Books in Guerneville CA, and Upper Case Books in Snohomish WA.
And I’m
sure if I did a thorough search of the house, I could come up with a dozen
more.
Finally,
there’s a special class of bookmarks: the two I paid for. One was purchased at
the Oxford University bookstore in 1990 and shows an image of the college, with
no additional information. The other was bought at a stationery store in Venice
in 2009. Not bad souvenirs, when you come to think of it. They cost almost
nothing and last a really long time if only you can manage to avoid losing
them.
