Bookmarks: A Personal and Convention Passion

by

Lauren Roberts

It was the hair that did it.

I was browsing the shelves at  Bart’s Books, a used bookstore formed out of an old house, when I noticed an old olive-colored book titled The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac. Being fond of both old volumes and books about books, I pulled it off the shelf only to have it fall open to pages 53-54. Tucked neatly at the beginning of the chapter entitled “Baldness and Intellectuality,” a bookmark particularly apropos to its location, sat quietly: hair. Specifically, a clump of golden brown hair, male from the length of it. It had lain undisturbed for so long it had even left visual stigmata on the page under it. I was enchanted and remain so.

It is the only bookmark I own that stays in the book and the only one made of hair. But that experience has grown into a collection of more than 1,300 bookmarks to date.

Bookmarks are considered ephemera, is a derivative of the Greek word, ephEmeros. Its first meaning in most dictionaries is “something of no lasting significance.” However, its second meaning—collectibles not intended to have lasting value—is probably be more accurate. How ironic it is then that things not intended to possess lasting value have indeed become valuable. The more precious antique ones (including old Coca-Cola ones) often go for hundreds, or even more.

Aside from their close relationship to books, bookmarks say so much with so little. They mark passages of time, family memories, history, bookstores, books, cities, events, businesses, libraries, tourist destinations, cultural events, and more. They come in paper, celluloid, plastic, silver, gold, pewter, wood, brass, copper, ivory, bone, aluminum, chrome, tin, plastic, leather, silk, woven yarn, fiberglass. There are famous ones such as the Coke ones and personal ones. Booksellers, publishers, stationers, funeral homes, secretarial schools, telephone companies, insurance companies and manufacturers of numerous products as well as nonprofit organizations used them for advertising and publicity purposes. Products such as soap, pianos, stoves, furniture, books, perfumes, patent medicines, shoes, clothes, tobacco and foodstuffs are promoted with bookmarks. Politicians used them for campaigning in the past, and even governments used them to encourage patriotic actions. Most are commercially produce. Others are homemade; many of the nineteenth-century ones were used by young upper-class women of the time to practice their needlework skills before tackling larger projects. Some were created simply to be beautiful, perhaps as gifts in stationery stores. What they all have in common regardless of their material, producer or purpose is that they pack a lot of information into a small size. And they are the perfect thing for a reader, book reviewer. and bibliophile to collect.

And so I have. For nearly six years now, I have been building my collection to the point where I have an estimated 1,300 bookmarks. That still puts me behind my co-writer for this column, Laine Farley, who appears to be topping 3,000. It’s a fascinating collectible, and just two weeks ago, the few of us who know one another had the opportunity to enlarge our circle when the inaugural Bookmark Collectors Virtual Convention that  I co-founded with my partner-in-bookmark-collecting Alan Irwin took place during three sessions spread over the twenty-four hours (8:00 am on Saturday to 8:00 am on Sunday) of February 20-21 to allow attendees from all over the world to attend. This worked out well, though I admit to not making it through the entire convention, collapsing in exhaustion an hour-and-a-half from the end.

The convention was actually the first of its kind—the first virtual convention for collectors of anything. Alan and I planned and fretted and conversed and worried. Would anyone actually want to attend? How much should we charge? How do we get the word out, especially given the fact that bookmark collectors unlike stamp or postcard collectors, are not yet an organized bunch. How do we get people to volunteer to be presenters? What equipment should we use?

It was an intensive process. The original presentation program proved, despite a half-dozen attempts, to be unsuitable. Alan instituted a frantic search for another. I began working with a couple of the presenters who were uncertain how to approach their presentations. We were both contacting groups and organizations, blogs and websites to let them know about the convention, and at least one newspaper in Washington picked up the story from which it shot out across the Internet. Registrations picked up. We were in business.

Saturday, February 20, morning dawned bright and beautiful, at least in our shared hometown of Santa Barbara. We had more than thirty attendees and six presenters, which thrilled us. And promptly at 8:00 we opened the virtual doors. Alan opened with his “Welcome presentation, sharing the schedule, what attendees could do—visit galleries, talk on forums, listen in and chat during the presentations that would be offered during the three sessions. We began to feel as if we had created something long sought when during the first session we attracted nearly twenty participants who listened to presentations on how to organize a bookmark collection, store and display a bookmark collection, buy antique bookmarks on eBay, getting over your embarrassment of being a collector, embroidering bookmarks, researching your bookmark collection, and more.

I can testify the presenters were initially nervous. I was one of them. But as is so often the case, our nervousness lasted only minutes. The attendees were enthusiastic participants, typing in comments and questions. Though we had few attendees during the second session—a late night/early morning one for us in California—the first and second were full.

My two presentations on storage and display and buying on eBay were well received, though I did have such problems with the latter that I ended up re-doing all of the images and some of the text on the entire 35-slide show between 11:00 pm and 1:00 am. It was exhausting but exhilarating.

One of the best times for me came at the end of my storage and display presentations when, having shown the wide range of possibilities for displaying these small, fragile items, I was able to show off my favorite display case—an antique coffee table found on CraigsList about five weeks before. In it lies my first bookmark: the hair. It sits exactly as I found it, the only bookmark that stays in “its” book. Alongside and around it are many others, mostly the three-dimensional ones that fit nowhere else. Three ivory ones, several wood ones (including a unique marquetry one) two silk Shakespeare’s, a paper one in the shape of a stocking, a silk one from the 1936 Berlin Olympics, one on its original card case from the 1939 World’s Fair, and a number of metal ones with different tops including stones, a lobster claw, plastic figures of parrots and eagles are among them. When I used these images to close out the presentation the oohs and ahhs from the attendees could almost be heard. It was the perfect ending to a superb convention that is already in the planning stages for next year. Will some of you join us then?

Almost since her childhood days of Mother Goose, Lauren has been giving her opinion on books to anyone who will listen. That “talent” eventually took her out of magazine writing and into book reviewing in 2000 for an online review site where she cut her teeth (as well as a few authors). Stints as book editor for her local newspaper and contributing editor to Booklist and Bookmarks magazines has reinforced her belief that she has interesting things to say about books. Lauren shares her home with several significant others including three cats, nearly 1,300 bookmarks and approximately 1,200 books that, whether previously read or not, constitute her to-be-read stack. She is a member of the National Books Critics Circle (NBCC) as well as a longtime book design judge for Publishers Marketing Association’s Benjamin Franklin Awards. Contact Lauren.