I have one bookmark. It’s a quite nice engraved metal one that was received as a gift. It has, since I got it, lived in the book that was also a gift (this, if you’re wondering. Good read.) I used it for that book, then said, “Hey, this is too nice to lose, therefore too nice to use on a regular basis.”
What I really use as bookmarks: (clean, folded) gum wrappers, library check-out receipts, post-it notes, class notes, and other miscellanious scraps of paper products. Inevitably, they disappear, so I refuse to spend any money on them.
I use ticket stubs from movies and plays as bookmarks. Occasionally, if I don’t have one handy (which is almost never), I’ll peel the price sticker off the cover (typically for Borders or Costco purchases), fold it in half with the adhesive inside, and use that.
I have a number of “official” bookmarks, laminated flowers and bird pictures and stuff, but I don’t really use them. I mean, I’ll use one once, and then it winds up in the book I used it for, stuck on the shelf. Look across the tops of the books in my bookshelf and you’ll see that probably one in three has a little slip of something or other sticking out of the top of it.
And I never fold pages. Ever. Ever ever ever. If you listen carefully, when you fold the page, you can hear the book screaming.
I’m a sucker for free advertising bookmarks, and any free piece of paper or card stock of approximately bookmark dimensions. I’ve piled up a lot of them over the years. I like to have a selection of sizes on hand so each book I’m reading can have an appropriately sized marker: longer than the page is wide, shorter than the book is tall. Really large bookmarks are for glue-bound magazines (stapled magazines, I fold inside-out).
Looking over my collection I notice that while most of the bookmarks advertise books (or booksellers), they cover a lot of terrain: many theater productions, Philly CarShare, textbook buybacks, the University of Pennsylvania honor code and a now-defunct cheesteak shop, among other things. There’s some train schedules in there too. And some paper sample strips I once got from a stationer.
My husband had to institute a rule in our household that I couldn’t buy more books than I can physically carry from the store.
I told him to be grateful. Some women love jewelery. I love books.
“Hmph!” he snorted. “Wish you did like jewelery-- I’d probably get off cheaper.”
You know you’re a bibliophile when:
– You had to buy a bigger house because you were running out of space for your collection.
– You had to take out a seperate insurance policy for your books and own no first editions of note.
–You immediately feel suspicious upon entering a house and seeing no books.
–You can remember the exact release date of that book you want but not to pay your mortgage on time.
–You sigh and shake your head when the new puppy chews up your shoes but consider having it skinned alive when you catch it chewing on a book.
– Your book bag weighs more than the rest of your luggage combined when travelling.
–When you’re stuck somewhere and have no books, you catch yourself reading ad signs, ingredient lists on food packages and instructions for items you don’t even own or drug warning sheets for medications you will never take.
–There is an extra book in your purse/briefcase, car, bathroom, and one in the kitchen so you can read while cooking.
–You think the most beautiful three words in the English language are “Book Sale Today!”
if i remember to get the bookmark from the library, i try to match it to the book. subject or location, perhaps character. the 'marks range from card stock to page clips to beaded.
i’ll use the aforementioned memorize page number or transpo ticket if i am transporting; should i forget a 'mark.
post its and post it flags do make good 'marks. just like the guy who invented them intended.
I’m very hard on books. I dogear the bejeezus out of them, or leave them spread open and face down. I read while I cook and while I do my hair and makeup, so my books are often speckled with food, or hair spray, or cosmetics. I read in the bathtub, and while I’ve rarely ever dropped a book in the tub, my hands get wet and the books get splashed. I read in bed, and sometimes fall asleep, so the book gets dropped on the floor, or slept on and creased. I’m also a huge re-reader, so the books I really love take on a Velveteen Rabbit appearance after a while.
My son (who has free reign of my library) is worse than I am. I make my bed every morning, so any books I’ve slept on get rescued after one night. Nick never makes his bed and it’s not uncommon for him to have as many as 3 or 4 books in there with him. Plus, he also reads in the bathtub and he’s pretty sloppy about leaving the books he’s read in the bathroom. I usually have a stack of books on my bedside table, but Nick also has a stack next to his bathtub. And he is a re-reader, too. His really well-loved books are sad sights indeed. He literally read my paperback copies of John D. Fitzgerald’s Great Brain books into shreds. I had to buy a whole new set in hardcover. He has a hard-cover John Steinbeck omnibus that he has also just about read to death. Mass market paperbacks are the worst. Nick brought me his copy of Jarhead to read and it looks like it’s been shot at and missed, and shit at and hit. When Nick loves a book, it knows it’s been loved.
I’m more careful with library books and borrowed books, though – for those, I use a bookmark. Not a ‘real’ bookmard, because I can never find one. I use a scrap of paper, usually.
I used to dogear pages. Now I use whatever scrap of paper is lying around. If I find a scrap that makes an especially good bookmark (there is a certain length and thickness I like; about 4 inches and slightly thicker than normal paper), I’ll use it until I lose it. Otherwise I throw it away after I finish the book.
I have certain bookmarks that live in certain books. One of my co-workers gave me a nifty metal Harry Potter Nimbus 2000 bookmark a few years back; it lives in my copy of Lord of the Rings. I have one plain cardboard w/ tassel bookmark that lives in Cold Comfort Farm, and another that lives in The Bone People. I have a really cool LotR bookmark that unfolds into a map of Middle Earth; that one stays on my nightstand and gets used in whatever I’m reading in bed. And I have a tarnished metal bookmark with my initials engraved on it, given to me by my grandmother when I was very small. It doesn’t get used because it’s one of those thingys that slips over the corner of the pages, and if you hold your book upside down it falls off.
Usually, though, I use whatever random slip of paper I can find. I don’t dogear pages. That’s for Philistines and puppy-kickers. ;j
I use bookmarks. I don’t dogear books any longer, nor do I crack the spine terribly, though I do bend it a little. I tend to use whatever clean piece of paper is lying around, or notecards. Sometimes I’ve made bookmarks. When I was a kid, and chewed a lot of gum, I’d peel the foil off of the inner gum wrapper and use that. Lately, I’ve peeled the gold foil off of a candy wrapper and pretended that I was Nero Wolfe, with a slim gold bookmark. I rarely use storebought bookmarks.
I used to use fancy bookmarks when I was younger but now I just use whatever paper is avaliable, usually a post-it note but sometimes a Balance Bar wrapper or something… I only dogear the book if I don’t like it.
I will probably burn in hell for this, but I usually throw away dust jackets the minute I get the book home. I can’t stand reading a book with a dust jacket on it. I used to take them off and put them somewhere safe, but I’d usually forget where I put them, or something dire would happen to the jacket before I could reunite it with the book. Eventually I decided there wasn’t much point in putting them back on the books unless they had particularly nice artwork or something on them.
For bookmarks, I use post-it notes. Regular paper tends to fall out of the book while I’m reading it, and so I lose my bookmark and have to find a new one. Post-it notes I just stick to the inside of the cover and voila! Stays in place.
Argh! Yet another thing I’m going to hell for: I, too, throw away dust jackets. I hate those things. I think books look so much nicer without them (says the girl with no problem dog-earing pages and making books scream like tomatoes).
I’ve got no problem respecting other people’s property, but if I own a book, I maul it to death. Territorial thing. You take one look at a book of mine and you say, “Yeah, that’s one of Stasia’s, all right.” That’s right. And don’t you forget it. I always get my books back.
Can’t say I have a dust-jacket opinion. I just know books are more valuable for re-sale with the dust-jacket complete and in good nick. I think books look nicer with them (but I mainly handle non-fiction these days). A lot of books have badly damaged dust-jackets or none at all in the second-hand bookstores which I’m drawn to like a moth to a rather costly flame, so – I’m neither for or against.
Whenever I use a nice bookmark, it disappears almost immediately. Whenever I use a random piece of paper lying around, it will last through several books (and I can doodle on it!). I learned to stick with the random pieces of paper.
My favorite impromptu bookmarks, though, came from a used copy of Dracula that crumbled like a staked vampire the first time I tried to read it. With hundreds of loose pages, I had all the bookmarks I could ever need.
I tend to agree. Books want to live with me in my nice, comfortable library, well-loved and cared-for. That’s why I don’t use the library. (Bastards want the books back.)
I can’t sell my books, even the ones I didn’t particularly enjoy. Each is a memory, a milestone. Each is a friend, though some friends are better than others. Who knows? Maybe one day I will pick up that novel I didn’t like and find myself engrossed by it upon a second attempt. It’s happened before.
I am very much a bookmark person. I use just about any piece of paper in my possession as a bookmark. I’m not above using a very small book as a bookmark into a much larger book, and that small book may, itself, contain a bookmark. Or two. I have one book with no fewer than seven bookmarks in it, and one of them is an old bank statement. (The book never leaves my house, of course.) I find that checks make fine temporary bookmarks, if I get one on a day that isn’t convenient for depositing checks. I think the highest-valued instrument I’ve ever used as a bookmark was a check in the low hundred dollar range.
I’m fond of companies that facilitate my bookmarking ways. O’Reilly, the publisher of many fine books about software and programming, is one of them: Many books they publish contain a reasonably-sized bookmark perfect for marking an especially interesting position and staying put. It’s masquerading as a Business Reply Mail postcard that, theoretically, would allow one to ‘register’ the book, but we all know that’s a transparent ruse concocted by a fellow bookmarker working within O’Reilly to provide bookmarks to his compatriots around the world.
I don’t sell my books. I buy them – hence why I know about the value. No one had better even think about sellin’ my books ‘till they’re certain my pulse is gone and I ain’t breathin’.
