Bookmarks

[WhereIsMyRollingPin]

Not what we're reading but what we're marking the pages with.

My current bookmark in the novel I'm reading is the picture from a pretty greetings card. In a non-fiction book I'm reading slowly I'm using an unwanted Nectar Points voucher.

What about you?

I’m looking online here for the last hour and can’t find what I’m looking for. I don’t want anything metal or wood, or any paperclip type. Just a heavy card type but something nice. I think I might have to go into an actual shop
to get what I’m looking for.

I crochet mine, really quick and easy to make!

Ooooh! I hadn’t thought of making my own, I can’t crochet but I can knit.

I'm a corner folder too. I only read paperbacks and I don't think they're that precious. I probably wouldn't do it to a hardback.
Or as I only read in bed I just lay the book face down on the page I'm on. Probably equally heinous.

My current one is actually some plaited wool! My son made it as a bracelet for me but hasn't tied the ends up and it ended up going in my book instead. It actually works quite well so you could do that fairly quickly?

Slightly off subject but I always feel like it’s a bonus when I find someone’s forgotten book mark in a book I’ve bought in the charity shop 😀

I have bookmarks from bookshops (Hatchards and Daunts mostly) but I have also used

Train tickets
Supermarket receipts
Pens
A strip torn off the top of the newspaper
Torn up junk mail
Sweet wrappers
Pill cartons
A metal bookmark that slips over the page
Envelopes
A page of the Radio Times folded
Post It notes
Those little sticky tags that are meant to mark pages

And yes have been a page folder in my time.

My best one I found in a charity shop book - dating from WW2 and encouraging people to donate cigarettes to the fighting men.

Weirdest one I ever heard about was someone opening a second hand book and finding a rasher of bacon used as a bookmark.

DH once bought a secondhand book about a composer and inside he found a handwritten letter by said composer that had been sent to someone else - presumably at one time the owner of the book. He sold it to a specialist manuscript dealer for a couple of hundred pounds.

I bought a memoir by the Scottish writer Janice Galloway and someone had been using, as a bookmark, a card written to them by Janice G thanking them for their nice comments about the book. So I've kept it in there.

I picked up a free bookmark in St Colman's cathedral in Cobh, it's the only one I own atm.

In the heat of the moment any scrap of paper I can find (I never fold a corner - the horror!) but what I like best and use most is ribbons - rescued from parcels or chocolate boxes. Bright coloured ones are extra useful if your books go and hide among other books or in the bed or on the sofa - you can spot your target from a distance.

Also off topic, but I put postcards and cuttings in books e.g. photocopy of a pc of Bath in 'Persuasion' and a pic of my aunt retiring from her job in her 1924-ish school prize copy of Tennyson's poems. I so hope that when I die and they go to the charity shop some efficient little whotsit won't throw those things out. They're there for such good reasons.

I grab an unused gift card at the tillwgen I’m buying a book to use as a gift card

At the moment the last of a batch of Paris Metro tickets - they make lovely, thin bookmarks and it’s nice to be reminded of Paris.

But mostly I just remember where I’ve got to.

<wincing at corner folding and spine cracking>

I'm a corner folder and spine cracker. I like a battered, well used book.
At the moment though I'm using my council tax bill as a bookmark.

I have a pile of Persephone book marks, but the two I am using at the moment are a William Morris strawberry thief one that was a present from a friend for feeding her cat, and a bobbin lace snake handmade by my late FIL.

I use my book light folded over. I dont just read in the dark but it has become a habit of mine over the last few years. I have some paper ones my daughter made in a jar waiting for use if I decide not to use the light or if the light is charging.

and yes I will fold the corner of pages if I need to. Just not on borrowed books. I also write notes in margins.

I got fed up of being a one bookmark wonder and bought some Japanese themed ones from Amazon.