What do you use to save your place in a book?

A piece of scrap paper? An old photo or business card?

A piece of toilet paper (we know where you’ve been reading!) or paper towel?

Maybe a bonafide bookmark?

As long as you don’t – gasp – fold, spindle or mutilate the page of your book, nearly anything will do.

While cataloging the hundreds of inherited books from my parents’ collection, I’ve come across many bookmarks. Some stir a memory. Others carry family history, tracing where we’ve lived. Others are just pretty.

For example, here’s a handmade bookmark from one of Mom’s good friends, Lorraine Lauzon. They met in the 1960s when we lived in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and stayed in touch for decades:

And speaking of Pittsfield, here’s a bookmark from the movement to build a new library there (which they did in 1975). Sadly, the gorgeous Berkshire Athenaeum – with its fairytale children’s room – built in 1876, no longer had enough room for the community’s expanding needs.

The bookmark on the left (above) is from Milford, Connecticut, where we lived in the early ’60s. I love the reminder up top to return books promptly and undamaged.

I’ve trained myself to always check to see if Mom might have written a poem that would fit with the current blog post’s topic.

Sure enough, here’s one from 2004:

Bookmarks

How easy to return to the old house
the battle the trip around the world
when bookmarks stop the clock
these everlasting passes give us
an immediate gateway back
in the center of a snowstorm
or on a sleepless night
or autumn afternoon
or in a hammock floating
over ferns in August

~ joan vayo 18 June 2004

This bookmark (a treasured notecard, actually) was a treat to find. It was stashed in one of Mom’s many Madeleine L’Engle books. They were dear friends.

Sure seems smart for bookstores to provide bookmarks to remind shoppers to return soon. Here are a few from my parents’ Connecticut years:

With so many inherited books from Mom and Dad, my parents never seem too far away. Their Folio Society collection never ceases to blow me away:

While rearranging the Folios in our library the other day, there it was.

Tucked inside one of the many volumes …

… a bookmark.

“Bookmarks” © 2004 Joan Cassidy Vayo. All rights reserved.

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