I never really intended to start collecting bookmarks, but somehow I’ve accumulated quite a little stack of them over the years. After a while, you keep some things long enough, I guess they become sentimental by default.
So it is with bookmarks – for a long time, I’ve made a habit of grabbing a free bookmark if a book store offers them on the counter – and really, all the best bookstores do that, because what bibliophile can resist a nifty little souvenir to jam into their freshly opened tomes?
From Alaska to New York to Oregon to Auckland to Australia, I’ve ended up with quite the burgeoning pile of bookmarks now, even though I know I may never use some of them for their intended purpose.
But they keep me company – and remind me of book memories, which are some of the best kinds of memories to have.
I keep almost all the bookstores of my life in my mind and have written about them before. Whether it’s familiar neighbourhood haunts or world-famous icons, they stick in my mind: The nameless bookstore somewhere in Montana I stopped at during a cross-country trip where I could barely afford petrol, but of course I bought a few books. The cheap paperback exchange in Oakdale, California that kept me alive that 8 months or so I worked in the most boring town I’ve ever lived in. The cavernous, overstuffed and cobwebby Book Barn south of Christchurch or the hip oasis of City Lights in San Francisco.
Book stores I was just passing through like ones in Bandon, Oregon; Alice Springs, Australia; Christchurch, New Zealand; Fairbanks, Alaska. If you visit a town and don’t try to check out the best local bookstore, are you even a tourist?
Sometimes I can still remember what I bought at them – I know I picked up a William Randolph Hearst biography at the Alaska one, 25 or so years ago, although I often cannot remember what I had for breakfast today.
The bookmarks I have remind me of spots like immortal Powells Books in Portland Oregon, still probably the best book store on the planet. I have dreams about it to this day.
Quirky ones like a souvenir of a great Salvador Dali art show in Melbourne, or a gift from an appearance by the Dalai Lama in Auckland I somehow ended up at.
Tokens of long gone stores I used to visit like Black and White Books in Reno or the fine art book speciality shop Parsons in Auckland or Jason Books in Auckland, the last one just shuttered in the last few months.
They’re just flimsy scraps of paper, mostly, some getting battered enough that I should retire them into a drawer so they don’t crumble to bits entirely.
But they’re part of my life in books, and that’s not a bad thing to keep hold of.
Nik Dirga 