Well, I thought that I’d talk about bookmarks today. I was originally going to talk about what I consider to be the best bookmark, but one of the interesting things about bookmarks is that the best one usually finds you in any given situation.
When I was a younger teenager, I remember using a slightly short plastic “Star Trek: The Next Generation” one with rounded corners – which I either got from a bookshop or a museum somewhere – and I’d also always mark my place in the book with a small triangle in pencil (because removing bookmarks was a favourite school bully prank, so it didn’t hurt to have a backup...), a practice which took literal years to fade away. Back then, I tended to reserve the dreaded “dog-earing” for marking any significant or memorable pages of the novel.
I think I just used random scraps of paper and/or cardboard during my late teens and early twenties. Interestingly, during my binge-reading phase in my very late twenties/early thirties, I’d use a square of green note-paper which I’d use to write tiny notes about the book on when I was reading it. Given that I was getting through a novel every 2-4 days and writing quite detailed reviews, having my notes on the bookmark was surprisingly useful (but just make sure to use quick-drying biro ink…). And, yes, a couple of years of this sort of binge-reading left me totally burnt-out on reading novels…. for about five years… afterwards. Seriously, don’t binge-read!
Anyway, when I eventually got back into reading novels this January, I was surprised to find that I instinctively used a random playing card (the four of clubs) as a bookmark. Since I still practice card-throwing pretty much every day (my accuracy is still dreadful, but it’s just fun to do), I’ve got quite a few heavily-used playing cards lying around. And, honestly, it’s a perfect bookmark. It’s short enough that, if you’re just randomly reading a few pages, you can just hold it between two fingers whilst you’re reading and it doesn’t get in the way. You don’t even have to put it down.
(And, on a side-note: Keeping the book away from your desk and putting it somewhere you walk past a few times a day, and sometimes reading from it when you do, seems to be a good way to avoid binge-reading. It’s a lot closer to the 1990s/2000s thing where novels were just a random thing many people either carried around or left lying around and read for a few minutes at a time. There wasn’t the whole “competitive reading” social media thing back then, so novels were often more of a background thing that was useful for filling a few spare minutes or making journeys a bit more interesting).
Not only that, there’s a weird timelessness and “roughness” to using a playing card that I really like. And, if you lose it, then you’ve got at least 51 other ones nearby that you can use instead. Since I don’t usually travel with books these days, I absolutely love shorter bookmarks. They probably don’t “grip” the book as well as a traditional full-length bookmark does – which could possibly be an issue if you’re travelling with a book – but their useful compactness more than makes up for this under the circumstances.
But, as mentioned earlier, I find it fascinating that the best bookmark is usually one which finds you. Like a Jedi’s lightsabre or a wizard’s wand, it’s one of those things which sort of shapes itself to you. Or it’s something which makes sense in context. And a lot of this is probably because pretty much anything thin can be used as a bookmark. You’ll just automatically gravitate towards whatever works best for you in any given context.
And this is usually something you don’t even notice or think about until you see a different type of bookmark. In my case, after ordering a second-hand book, the shop threw in a couple of traditional-style bookmarks with their logo/website printed on them. This was cool, and probably good marketing, but I took one look at these bookmarks and just put them to one side “They’re way too long to be practical“. Seriously, I don’t know what it is about me and short bookmarks but this seems to be the main thing that most of the bookmarks I use have in common.
But, again, there isn’t really one universal “best bookmark”. If you read physical books, then you’ve probably already found the best bookmark for you. Or it has found you.
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Anyway, I hope that this was interesting 🙂
