Old books and their bookmarks

I had the task of looking through a couple of boxes of books donated to the library yesterday. Donations can be extremely interesting, and I’m not just referring to the content of the books. I like to observe the condition of the books, including their overall appearance, smell and feel. Really old books have a musty, intriguing smell and often feel good – nice to hold. Sometimes we are given books that have been stuck in someone’s shed or garage for ages – we’ve had books that were completely infested with silverfish, weather stained, stained with other unmentionables…

My pet peeve when looking at donations (at any books, for that matter), is finding that the books have had highlighter used on their pages. Highlighter is so permanent! Not only that, it only looks good (if the bright fluoro colours can be called that) for a while – give it time and the colours fade and just make the book look even more faded and used than it needs to be. I suppose I’ve just never been a fan of the highlighter; if I’m going to annotate anything a pencil is enough for me.

Fortunately, yesterday’s books weren’t badly marked, although a couple of them did have chewed-looking corners, as if a puppy used them as a chew toy. In yesterday’s books there were a few bookmarks. I think this would have to be my favourite thing about looking through old books: finding the bookmarks their readers have used. Now I think of it, I’ve found many bookmarks over the years. It’s always interesting when the bookmark is an old business card, bus ticket or clipping from a newspaper article or magazine. Regular bookmarks are interesting too, of course.

I don’t know how old that Women’s Day bookmark is; the website listed on the back for the West Australian Women’s Information Service is defunct. International Women’s Day is next week, on March 8.

The Arcane Bookshop no longer exists, either. Pity. I’m glad I’ve got a bookmark to remember it by.

I like the Toronto Women’s Bookstore bookmark with its Alice Walker quote: “If a book doesn’t make us better, then what on earth is it for?” Indeed.

Bookmarks aren’t always inspirational or intellectual, of course. Nothing wrong with a bit of cute in our lives, is there? The Hello Kitty bookmark didn’t come in yesterday’s boxes, though. As far as I recall I found it in among a donation of textbooks.