Strange Bookmarks…

Last updated on 22 March 2022

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I do believe I told you a little while ago that I work in a library, but I work more with the internet based side of things (their website, blog, LibGuides etc). Some days I have to sort out books, donations that we get in from people around New Zealand, just to find out if we already hold the book or not. Some of the books that come in are super old, and while the topics don’t really interest me (they’re not novels. Booooo), what’s inside the books does.

I’ve discovered that it’s truly amazing what people will use for a bookmark when they don’t have one on hand. Over the past two months, I’ve been collecting the bookmarks and bookmark-substitutes from inside these books, and I’ve had some interesting finds! I finally decided that my haul at work was bursting out of its file, and it was time to bring them home. And would you just look at all of them!

Seriously though, how funny is that chip packet?! And I’m not even making it up; that was between the pages of a book. I can just imagine somebody reading the book, getting peckish, grabbing a bag of chips and continuing to read, only to be distracted by something and have to put the book down, and with no bookmark, an empty chip packet would have to do. I wonder why they never came back to the book…

Here are a few of my favourites:

It’s the stories behind the bookmarks that really make me wonder. Especially that chip packet. But some of these others, like the postcards with ‘dear Dad’ on them, or the Queen hailing a taxi…it makes me wonder about how they got the bookmark, why they used that one…and more importantly, why they never finished the book.

Presumably, they would have taken the bookmark out, had they completed reading it. Apparently, all these people never finished. I wonder how much they missed out by not reading the rest of the book. I wonder why they stopped. I wonder why they didn’t check their books for bookmarks before they sent them to use, or returned them to the library.

It’s amazing the questions that arise when you find a little piece of paper hidden in the pages of a book.

What have you found in the pages of book before?