Bookmarks & Memory

by

Frank X. Roberts

Anyone who has a cat for a pet will be familiar with the way cats go about the house or the garden marking places to be returned to, or remembered as their own, by releasing scent from a gland in the sides of their faces. Although the cat probably uses its sense of smell to relocate the spot, when a given place is visited often enough its scent substance accumulates, eventually becoming a visible marker which can be seen by the human eye. Using body fluids as natural markers to relocate places where, for example, food has been hidden, seems to be an instinctual, if not a conscious habit, in the animal world.

Ernest Richardson, in The Beginning of Libraries, says that “[if] it is true that the animals do make conscious marks to guide them back to hidden objects, or even that they do have memory for facts, which is true memory, then possibly the beginnings at least of memory libraries and perhaps of external records must in the future be sought in the animal world.” Richardson appears to suggest that these animal habits, whether conscious or instinctual, led to the development of “markers” in the mind or in the memory of early man, and were used to recall or relocate not only physical places but also information and ideas previously stored in the memory.

How much psychological reality there is in these ideas relating to or supporting the development of the human use of memory in the process of recall and retrieval in early civilizations is still being argued. Yet, what is unquestionable is the importance of the use of memory in the oral societies of early man.

In the Phaedrus, Socrates reports a conversation between the Egyptian God Theuth, the supposed inventor of writing, and the God Thamus, King of all Egypt at that time. “Letters,” said Theuth, “will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories;” Thamus replied, “O most ingenious Theuth the inventor of an art is not always the best judge of his own inventions; so this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not trust their memories, they will trust to external written characters and not remember themselves.”

As it turned out, Thamus had a point. Even though memory played a major role in the preservation of the culture, and in the daily life of primitive oral societies, and continued to be a highly respected educational tool well into the Middle Ages, over time it was almost wholly replaced by the use of “external written character,” and the many memory aids and “tools” created to manipulate and to use the recorded word.

But archeological evidence also shows that early civilizations did not depend solely or wholly on memory. It appears that from quite early on humans used external and visible marking devices to aid in the recall and retrieval of information and knowledge. In the Middle East, for example, archeologists have discovered 5,000-year-old clay tokens marked with incisions and impressions said to have been used as memory aids in oral cultures to keep track of cattle sales and other money transactions. It is also claimed that in the impressions in these clay tablets or tokens (called bullae) may be found the earliest precursors of writing. And other anthropological and archeological discoveries, such as the signs, symbols and paintings found on the walls of ancient caves, on animal skins, and even on human skin (in the form of tattoos), the “quipus” or knotted cords, the so-called “tally” or message sticks, and a variety of other devices used by primitive humanity, testify to the fact that in oral cultures based on memory, physical or external memory aids were in common use.

Nevertheless, the consensus of modern research on oral cultures is that the communication of information and knowledge based on memory remained important and pervasive in early civilizations. Before writing was invented, important events, and the rules and mores which regulated ancient civilizations and societies, were kept in the memory. In oral societies the verbal formulas and phrases retained in the memory and chanted repeatedly by story-tellers, and other social leaders, were the “markers” used to retrieve from memory the rules, the methods and the knowledge upon which the development and order of a social group relied. There were no written records as such; what was known was known largely in the memory.

Over time early civilizations accumulated written records, but oral communication of information and knowledge based on memory remained pervasive in the form of movable collections called “memory libraries.” The shaman or medicine man was (and still is in some places) a “living library” of the lore of his tribe. In the ancient world anyone able to bring forth from memory a desired passage from say, Aristotle or Plato, usually won the argument. Rich citizens too lazy to train their memories used slaves to memorize written works to recall or recite when their masters desired, the slaves becoming, as it were, human libraries and human bookmarks.

Mary Carruthers in The Book of Memory, A Study of Medieval Culture, argues that for a long time after the invention of writing (probably around 3000 B.C.) and after the transition from oral culture to literate culture, memory remained a highly important tool in the functioning of society. She contends that, even with the rise of literate culture, the creation of books and the compilation of other written records, the use of memory (“memoria” or the art of memory) for the recall and retrieval of information continued well into the Middle Ages, and was held in very high esteem, especially in the world of learning.

In the Middle Ages it was widely believed that a trained memory “was . . . an integral part of the virtue of prudence, that which makes moral judgment possible,” and that “it was in a trained memory that one built character, judgment, citizenship and piety.” Another tenet of medieval literate culture was that genuine knowledge and learning could not be gotten from the pages of books. Rather, real knowledge was stored in the memory. Books were merely devices to aid the memory, and the memory itself was thought of as resembling the pages of a book. Information, phrases, paragraphs, ideas from a given text or from a particular page in a book were to be learned, retained in memory and retrieved or “read” from the memory through the use of various mental markers called loci. These markers were to be created and related to ideas or pieces of knowledge or information when learning was taking place. To master such mental gymnastics, memory training was taught and practiced by scholar and students throughout the Middle Ages. Instruction in the so-called “artificial memory” was intended to teach methods or ways to develop the creation and use of these “bookmarks” in the memory for facilitating the recall and retrieval of thoughts and ideas learned and stored in the memory for use in life or in speaking or in writing.  

Though practiced widely and for a long time among certain segments of medieval society, inevitably learning through the use of memory techniques succumbed to the wider availability of books, and to the relative ease of using books to obtain information and knowledge. Medieval readers eventually began (in the words of the Egyptian God Thamus) to “trust to the external written characters.” Part of the reason for this was the simple fact that more and better ordered books were becoming available, making it less necessary to remember what one could more easily re-read or re-check in a book at hand.

Frances Amelia Yates in her book, The Art of Memory, the locus classicus on the subject of medieval memory techniques, describes the paramount importance of memory in learning, which persisted throughout most of the Middle Ages. But she also says that toward the end of the fifteenth century, “the art of memory was dying out.” “Killed by the printed book.”

The “book” Yates is referring to is, of course, the codex or leaf-book, the form of the book as we know it today. Three distinct types of bookmarks were developed as memory aids or, to use a modern term, informational retrieval devices, for use within the codex after it had replaced all other forms of the book in the early Middle Ages.

The first was the “tab” or “fore-edge” bookmark fixed to pages to mark special sections of a book or the beginning of chapters; this type was used, for example, in church missals. The second type was the “register” or “ribbon” bookmark, a strip of material (frequently vellum, but also string or rough cord), attached to the spine or headband of a volume, long enough to extend beyond the length of a page. Examples of this type are still found in ancient bound manuscript books. The third was the portable or loose bookmark. This, the most familiar of the three types, used as memory aids by medieval readers, came, as they still do today, in many shapes and sizes and made of every kind of material, animal, vegetable and mineral.  

Obviously these devices made it easier for readers in the Middle Ages to keep and find their places in books and to retrieve information more readily without having to rely too heavily on memory. Probably in part owing to natural human laziness, these methods soon replaced the labor and effort of trying to keep everything in the memory. Though courses on memory improvement techniques are still offered in our own time, average readers no doubt continue to find it more convenient to use bookmarks to remind them where they left off reading or to mark for themselves a passage to be recalled or reread.

Today bookmarks, in addition to acting as memory aids within books, are also collected as memory records of the information, advice or wisdom printed on them, or as souvenirs to remind collectors of some literary or historical personage or event or place visited.

Here at the beginning of the twenty-first century, when the storage and retrieval of ideas and information has become so highly automated, that most ancient and least technical of all information storage systems, the book (despite the many dire prognostication of its demise) is still going strong. And along side it, or more accurately perhaps within it, that most ancient of memory aids and information retrieval device, the bookmark, still continues to perform its assigned task unfailingly for weary and forgetful readers.


Frank’s extensive career in teaching and librarianship began when he taught English in the U.S. From 1961 to 1963, as part of a Columbia University program called “Teachers for East Africa,” he taught English and American Literature in East Africa. There he met his wife, Dorothy. They returned to the U.S. where he simultaneously taught and finished two Masters’ degrees, in Education and in Librarianship. In 1968 they returned to England where Frank taught Library Studies, and adopted Hodge, a cat who later traveled around the world with them. In 1972, Frank was “seconded” for two years to teach at Makerere University in Uganda, East Africa, but left reluctantly after one year when the tyranny of Idi Amin became intolerable. From there it was back to England, then Australia and finally  to America in 1979, to Buffalo where Frank earned his doctorate. Later they moved to Colorado, where he was Professor of Library Studies at the University of Northern Colorado until retiring in 1997. Frank published James A. Michener: A Checklist of his Work with a Selected Annotated Bibliography (Greenwood Press) in 1995. He has written on bookmarks, specifically on medieval bookmarks, his special area of interest. A poet by avocation, he writes eclectically but traditionally. Contact Frank.