The Legend of the Bacon Bookmark Redux

by

Laine Farley

I knew when I saw the story in the local news about Bacon Camp that it was time to revisit the Legend of the Bacon Bookmark. This meeting of bacon aficionados helps explain why bacon consumption is up 40% since 2003. These people not only eat bacon in every way possible, they want to drink bacon-infused vodka, wear clothes featuring the distinctive strip and sleep on pillows that look like bacon. If there is a whole subculture devoted to bacon as a way of life, it’s no wonder that bacon occasionally finds its way into books. And the recent mention of the first column on bacon bookmarks in the Paper Cuts blog of the New York Times spurred new interest in bacon sightings. 

A commenter on the blog entry named Martyn claimed first hand experience, finding two bacon rinds in a book he was reshelving in a library in Saffron Walden, England in the 1970s. “When I worked in a library in Saffron Walden, England, during the period 1975-78,” he reported, “one of the books I was re-shelving had two bacon rinds inserted as book marks. The other interesting thing I found used as a bookmark was an envelope containing £110 - it was reclaimed within five minutes.” With more diligent searching, I found some accounts that had appeared before my 2006 article with most of them coming from librarians. From a library listserv called Library Juice, a discussion in 2003 yielded two indirect accounts of bacon found in books at Iredell County Public Library in Statesville, NC, and bacon as well as bologna found by someone’s wife at Phoenix Public Library along with another account of bologna appearing at the Hobbs Public Library. The account of other “unusual things found in books” in this thread is also worth a read.

In a November 30, 2004 newspaper article by Greg Sax in the Napa Valley Register titled “Between the pages: Finding treasure and trash in Napa library books,” librarian Michele Amendola at the Calistoga public library claimed to have found raw bacon used as bookmarks. In another California library in Tulare County, librarian Brian Lewis found a piece of fried bacon according to a story titled “Hidden Treasure: Store Owners Find the Forgotten Inside Pages of Books” in the Tulare Advance-Register dated September 7, 2004. Lewis speculated that someone had been eating a BLT sandwich when the doorbell rang.

Another explanation for how bacon arrived in a book was offered in an article titled “Bacon as a Bookmark? Librarians Tell All” by Mike Harden in the Columbus Dispatch, Mar. 20, 2007. Gerald Schwab, the circulation manager of the Columbus Metropolitan Library explained “I was working at the Parsons Avenue library and I found a piece of uncooked bacon.” He went on to say “It was a cookbook. They must have been using it in the kitchen.” Logical enough but wouldn’t the chef have realized there was a missing ingredient?

Librarian Debra Blanchard at the Athol Public Library in Athol, MA also claimed to have found bacon in books but her more immediate concern in an article published on April 2, 2009 in the Telegram and Gazette titled “No Fooling, Mail Brings a Mystery” was the mysterious package that arrived at the library on April 1. It turned out to be harmless so the reporter had to end the story with a short list of odd items returned in books.

Bill Barnes, one of the creators of the Unshelved comic strip about libraries, was interviewed by Brian Warmouth in a Sepyember 14, 2006 entry in Wizard.com fittingly titled “Bacon Bookmarks and Library Life.” When asked about the most disturbing thing he has learned from his fans, Barnes tells the story of a woman who told him about bacon used as a bookmark which later inspired one of his comic strips. When Barnes went to his first library conference to promote his book of comics, the woman attended his event and identified herself. Barnes continued,

I shook her hand, I thanked her and said that it was really funny. Standing right next to her was another woman who said, “That happened in my library.”  I said, “Are you two in the same library?” They weren’t. In fact, one was from Ohio and one was from Alberta. So now, we're kind of celebrities when we go do these keynotes at library conferences and stuff. We’ve actually started polling people, because I think that this is such a funny story, and we say, “Raise your hand if you’ve ever had someone return a book with a bacon as a bookmark.”

We always get three or four raised hands. So it's actually an international phenomenon. It's an epidemic. Isn't that amazing? That's how so sort of uniformly weird people are, it's that something you can’t quite imagine is actually quite common and widespread.

By the way, [the bacon bookmarks] are about 50-percent cooked and 50-percent uncooked. We increased the granularity of our polling.

Barnes provided a  comment on the Paper Cuts blog, Librarian, There's Some Bacon in My Book, with similar information: “We speak at library conferences about a dozen times a year, and each time we always ask the attendees if they’ve ever personally experienced bacon as a bookmark. Every time between two and five people raise their hands. The only time they didn’t was in Alaska, where several people had personally experienced salmon as a bookmark.”

Another poll on Oct. 24, 2006 by blogger “pseudomonas” on “what do you use as bookmarks?” resulted in a bar chart showing frequency of commonly reported items with “food items” totaling only 8.1%. In the comments, there were accounts of finding bacon (cooked and uncooked) in library books by two people who worked as library assistants. One noted “there is something about bacon” that lends itself to being a bookmark, presumably the shape. Granted, it is long, narrow and flat, but surely most people would take into account other less worthy characteristics like floppiness and greasiness?

There was also an account in 2003 by a collector of A. E. van Vogt book and magazine covers who claimed he found a copy of D. F. Jones’ Colossus and the Crab in a used bookstore in Texas with a strip of bacon between pages 78 and 79. Such a specific description lends credibility but he offered no physical proof.

Another enticing possibility comes from an unexpected source: A dictionary of English manuscript terminology, 1450-2000 by Peter Beal. The entry for “bookmark” on p. 45 says that “any suitably sized object whatsoever may be used as a bookmark. As early as the fourteenth century, a bishop (Richard de Bury, 1287-1345) could deplore the use of straws as bookmarks, since they were apt to decay. Books bequeathed by the jurist John Seldon (1584-1654) to the Bodleian Library, Oxford, were found to contain dozens of pairs of spectacles that he used as bookmarks. In a poster displayed in more recent years by the British Library, examples of objects found in books and used as markers included a rasher of bacon and a jam sandwich.” Without a date or more specific information, I was unable to locate any other mention of the poster, again failing to find physical evidence.

Henry Alford’s essay “You Never Know What You’ll Find in a Book” in the New York Times, December 19, 2009 provides a wonderful literary angle on oddities found in books. The illustration accompanying the article is a fitting image of transparent books containing a letter, money, bacon, and something unidentifiable but scary left by “book depositors.” Tantalizingly, he refers to “the slice of fried bacon that the novelist Reynolds Price once found nestled within the pages of a volume in the Duke University library.” I could find no further mention of this incident and Alford almost seems to take it for granted. I haven’t yet had the courage to write to Professor Price who still teaches at Duke to inquire. 

Two additional literary associations are revealed in the comments on the Paper Cuts blog. A commenter named Jim cites Paul Johnson’s book, Intellectuals (p. 317), and describes how Cyril Connolly marked his place in books taken from his host’s library with rashers of bacon. Sarah Fisher mentions that John Barth’s book, Tidewater Tales, features a librarian who finds bacon in a book, perhaps informed by Barth’s wife who is a librarian. And library circulation staff exchange tales of odd things found in books, claiming to have found a fried egg along with bacon. Eventually, one of the librarians mounts an exhibit titled “UFOs (unidentifiable flat objects): The Public’s Gifts to the Public Library.“

Alford refers to a compilation at Abebooks.com of items “Found in Books” by booksellers with many of the familiar oddities but distinguished by its categorization of them into The Financial, The Literary, The Natural, The Sporting, The Mysterious, The Personal, and The Just Plain Weird, the latter being where bacon resides. 

One of the artists contributing to the Bookmarks VI project must have read this list or a similar one for inspiration for her bookmark design. Laurie Whitehill Chong is the Special Collections Librarian and Curator of Artists’ Books at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). The Library served as a distribution site for the Bookmarks IV project which was very popular with the students. Laurie was inspired to the project in 2007 using discarded library catalog cards for artists’ books. She describes her 2008 design as follows:

I decided that I wanted to do something in letterpress with wooden type.  The idea for my Things Found in Library Books bookmark came from an exhibition that we used to have in the library each year at the end of the spring semester. We would save all of the stuff we had found left in returned library books that we couldn’t immediately connect with the owner and display it in our exhibit cases near the entrance. We were hoping that students might come and claim their papers, drawings, letters, and photos because we knew that they were of some value to the owners. We stopped doing this exhibit when we moved into our new library in 2006 but the memory of some of those unusual items made me think of that as a theme for my bookmark project.

I composed wooden type of various sizes and fonts right on the press bed, locked up the type and printed the words by hand on a Vandercook press on Crane’s Lettra paper, about 10” X 18”.  Then I cut up the words in horizontal strips, about 2.25” X 7.5” to make the bookmarks. Each bookmark ended up having about 2 or 3 different items, including:  feather, concert ticket, diamond ring, matches, pen, marriage certificate, junk mail, boarding pass, love letter, money, photograph, bacon, twist ties, 4 leaf clover, shopping list, bobbie pin, comb, and baseball card.

I was working at the Bloomingdale Branch of the NYPL, on the Upper West Side. Weeding is one of my favorite collection development tasks, and often when my immediate supervisor, the head adult librarian, who didn’t love to weed, was off, she would have me go through a section and pull out books to discard.

I wish I could remember the book, or even the section, I was weeding (although it was almost certainly non-fiction, and the 300s and 800s were my longest projects). I would pull the books and decide whether to keep them or not, or whether to replace them, and immediately delete from the catalog and box up the books to be discarded, which most often the circulation staff did, rather than the librarians. I remember that it seemed like something was in the book, keeping the spine from being flat – this happens a lot when people take books to the beach – so I held the book upside down and shook it, and rather than sand, all this brown stuff came out. I found the page in the book where most of it seemed to be in the gutter of the spine, and there was a long, thin grease stain almost down the length of the book. I figured it must have been a slice of bacon, all crumbled up.

Well, I can understand the desire to grab whatever is close by to mark your page – it’s what I do. Food, though, does a number on the book. Some librarians might disagree, but I’m going to give folks permission to just fold down the top corner of the page . . . fold it back up before you return the book, and we busy librarians will never be the wiser.