My new bookmark boldly announces ‘The Lincoln Castle’, a black-and-silver mid-sized cylindrical thing that could be cardboard — though, after running my thumb up and down it, I think it may be leather.
I found it abandoned in a library book and gave it a home between the pages of one of my own books. There’s a thing about bookmarks — they have to be just right for the book. Friends who know of my reading habit have given me bookmarks from across the seven seas, including an enamelled dagger-like specimen from Ireland, a gilt laurel wreath from Canada, a plastic multi-coloured set of arrows from Japan — all of these are meant to be fixed to pages, with the business end pointing to the section you are reading.
Simple enough in theory, but in practice more complicated. For instance, how many pages can you fit between the prongs without leaving grooves on the paper? For some reason, bookmark grooves signify cruelty to the written word, almost on a level with dog- earing pages or leaving a book open face-down on a bed or table — especially for books with rather weak spines.
No, I’m certain this Lincoln Castle bookmark is leather, but at least it doesn’t have fringes. I had a Charles-Diana wedding bookmark in thick brown leather with gold tooling and fringes. Through books, the fringes began to drop off and a crack showed on the sleek surface — metaphorical, I suppose, when you consider the wedding it represented. I ultimately stored it very carefully in a book I didn’t read too often, hoping that non-use would preserve it, and now I realise I’ve forgotten which book that was. In my multi-layered jumble of book stacks and shelves, I am continually losing bookmarks.
The Crossword [bookstore] bookmarks are a distraction of another sort. The thread that is meant to stick out from between the pages tends to unknot itself over readings, resulting in a frantic game of ‘find the thread, work it back into its proper ‘eye’ and knot it again’, having meanwhile lost the thread of it in the fidgety business.
Ultimately, of course, the thread does wriggle out once and for all, and the bookmark slips down between the pages. I have lost many Crossword bookmarks — now waiting to be found when I next return to the book — simply because the task of shifting the bookmark when I shunt between books has become something of a chore.
In a world of lost bookmarks, stumbling upon a bookmark left in a library book creates a Eureka moment. I can actually transfer it to the book I plan to read next.
The Lincoln Castle bookmark, I realise, is serendipity. Other found bookmarks have not been so stylish: a broad one that advertises an Indian bodice ripper with appropriate photographs of the author and plugs for the book, and which must have been stuffed into a library book for want of anything else at hand; a scarlet Oxford bookmark that my mother is using and which I have resolved to promptly appropriate when I can; a very useful foldover, flip-flop type of bookmark that seemed to operate by a mysterious paper magnetism, and which I used until struck by anxiety that the ingenious foldover flaps might disintegrate — the last too has been lost in one of my books somewhere. The urban dictionary has a word for it — bookmarchaeology, which they define as ‘owning 7,852 bookmarks yet never finding one when you need it’! Officially, however, the term doesn’t exist in English.
I never really forget my bookmarks — it’s just a matter of remembering which book’s mercy I abandoned them to. Perhaps at some point I will be able to boast a bookmark for every book — but between that time and Lincoln Castle, whatever happened to that black leather Shakespeare bookmark I had?
Anjana Basu is a Kolkata-based writer