Bookmarks for the Ages

I've been collecting bookmarks sporadically for many years.  I read a lot of books, and I often read several books at once stashed in various locations around the house thus necessitating several bookmarks in circulation at once.  As a kid, I also read stacks and stacks of books.  The Florence Park Branch of the Tulsa Library was one half block from the Warehouse Market, my mother's grocery store of choice.  Every time she went to the store, I went to the library lugging at least 10 books back and forth each time.

By the time I was 11, I had read ALL (literally) of the books in the children's section.  Young Adult literature was in it's infancy in 1961, so my solution to having reading material was to jump to Adult Fiction.   Since I knew nothing about the authors, and there weren't book blurbs on those hard as iron book covers adorning the library shelves of my childhood, I can remember picking books by titles that caught my interest or even by the color of the spines!  In practicality, it meant I started and stopped several books at a time.  My solution was to leave them open lying all over the house.  This habit drove my mother insane.  (It was my inability to turn off electricity that made my father froth at the mouth.)  She was always closing my books with a spare scrap of paper to mark my place, none of which inspired me to use bookmarks.

I've actually collected fridge magnets longer than bookmarks.  These are bulky, and I like to display them.  Drake has made me two large black lacquer frames around a piece of sheet metal which are discreetly hung in the Sun City house.  As small as this house is, it's difficult to find a discreet place for a 3' by 4' frame.  The picture is a tiny section of one of these frames.  As you can see I have

LOTS of magnets.  The more I collected, the more repetitive they seemed.  Every National Park has the same type of panoramic picture of its famous view.  It has been getting harder and harder to find unique magnets, and my collecting has slowed.  Now to be a purchase, a magnet has to be quirky to get my attention.

The world of bookmarks has opened up to me gradually as I've rejected more and more magnets. Bookmarks come in lots of forms.  Sometimes I use a favorite card as a bookmark - like the one I have from Willie Dale, a friend who has passed from this life.  I have bookmarks Sarah bought me on some of the vacation trips we took when she was a child.  A friend of mine collects Gilbert and Sullivan memorabilia some of which comes with forms of advertising from the early 20th century.  These look like colorful and quaint business cards. He's given me his 'discards' as bookmarks.  My New Orleans bookmark is a slender piece of gold metal with a pelican on the end.  This was a gift for dancing with a crew member of a Mardi Gras social club at their annual Mardi Gras Ball in 1984.

My current favorite bookmark is the skyline of New York City I purchased at the Metropolitan Art Museum.  It's three inches of metal with a cord on the end to hang out of the book.  In the three inches are the outlines of every famous NYC landmark from the Brooklyn Bridge to the Statue of Liberty and every famous building in Manhattan.  I just got a postcard to use as a bookmark from Van Horn, Texas.  It's from Rodney's Coffee Cafe, "Where passing through meets here to stay!"  The postcard is a reproduction of an original painting by Winston McInnis - painted on the wall of the cafe.

I have two layers of bookmarks in the house - the favored ones currently in circulation, and the ones that are resting until I rediscover them.  It's like having a museum with personal archives.  Sometimes I buy bookmarks to remind me of a famous person we've encountered in our travels.  My Harriett Beecher Stowe bookmark says, "Women are the architects of their society."  I have a bookmark from Richmond of Phoebe Yates Levy Pember, a famous woman in her time who's unknown today.  She can be considered the Clara Barton of the Confederacy. Another current cool one not designed to be a bookmark is from Chocolatier Blue, a chocolate maker in Berkeley.  It's the card describing their various chocolates.  (My fave of the 25 concoctions on the card:  Chili:  "crushed red pepper flakes steeped in fresh-farm cream and blended with organic butter for a fiery dark chocolate creation".)  One of my new bookmarks is an original watercolor painting from an artist in Lake Tahoe.  I'm also a sucker for a bookmark with a tassel.  A swinging tassel hanging out of a book just means good times to me.

If all goes according to plan, we will have a travel trailer by this time next week, and since weight and space are going to be an issue next summer, bookmark collection as we traverse Maine and Canada is going to thrive.