Bookmarks - Treasures Between the Pages

Books often carry little traces of their previous readers, and bookmarks are perhaps the most literal of them all. Considering how many beautifully designed bookmarks are on sale every year, it’s remarkable how rarely we find a real bookmark  inside our books at Bókin. Instead, we steadily discover an impressive variety of "improvised substitutes".

I always love these little discoveries as they tell us something about the previous book owner

Recently, I found a Mikado stick turned bookmark tucked inside Kafka’s The Great Wall of China - a story about building the enormous wall in rather puzzling, disconnected sections. Considering Mikado is all about carefully moving sticks without disturbing the others, I couldn't help appreciating the curious coincidence. I wonder what Kafka would have made of it. :-)

But the Mikado stick isn't the only improvised bookmark we come across... Bookmarks can come in the form of fabric labels...

...or playing cards...

...they can be tea-bag wrappers...

…or homemade ones, cut from sketchbooks, visually resembling the book cover…

They can take the form of pretty postcards...

......desperate last-minute scribbles from someone trying to make sense of the book in their hands...

or letters.

They can even come as a lovely little piece of American fashion history, recently found in  Sólon Íslandus: a certificate of authenticity for a pair of vintage Lee Fastback trousers, repurposed as a bookmark. Quite a journey for a trouser label!

This list could go on forever as it turns out that the creativity of readers is practically endless.

Finding so many improvised bookmarks made me curious about their history, so I did a little research. It turns out bookmarks have been around for a very long time. The oldest surviving example dates back to sixth-century Egypt, where a decorated leather marker was attached to a Coptic book.

Medieval readers took things a step further. They invented rather sophisticated rotating bookmarks that could remember not just the page, but the exact column and line where they had stopped reading.

A little numbered disc was attached to a string inside the book. You simply slid it down to the line where you stopped and turned the disc to indicate which of the columns you were reading. Rather clever, especially considering that most of us nowadays rely on a supermarket receipt.

Only around 35 of these remarkable little inventions were known to survive in a 2001 inventory. In 2005, the one shown above sold at Sotheby's for an astonishing $11,000. 

By Victorian times, bookmarks had become fashionable little collectibles, especially beautifully woven silk designs featuring flowers, poems and sentimental messages. Some are still treasured by collectors today, like the woven silk bookmark from around 1870 shown below by Thomas Stevens.

But the funniest discovery during my bookmark research was this BBC article about a slice of cheese used as a bookmark in a book at the University of Liverpool.

I’m rather relieved we haven’t found one between the pages yet. Although, considering the price of cheese in Iceland, that would almost be like finding a $100 bill. ;-)

Sadly, we haven’t found one of those either.