Marking Our Spot

We're a person of many bookmarks - people who've looked in our books will know this for a fact. All our books (okay, nearly all our books) will carry leather bookmarks, pieces of paper, scribblings, cards, receipts, cash, movie stubs, odd momentos, parking tickets, expired MPH book vouchers, even our Touch 'n Go at one point (when we used to commute - we'll be reading all the way, even as we walked, and when we reached the turnstile we'll slam our book on the Touch 'n Go panel and walk through when it beeped).

Generally the first bookmark our books gain would be the book's receipt. But not all of them have receipts for bookmarks - we don't just buy one book sometimes, and we've gotten a few more books as presents. After that, the books slowly pick up bits and pieces as we buy stuff and the likes - after all, the book acts as a handy wallet when we need to stash stuff away quickly.

Still - we can't say that the miscellenous bookmarks are a permanant fixture for a book. When someone borrows a book from us, we'll scan the book and remove all bookmarks first - cash especially - and transfer them into another book. When we get our books back then we'll reshuffle bookmarks here and there again.

The interesting thing about having so much of these things in our books? We'll pick back up an old book for a reread, come across an old receipt with the actual date we bought the book, the feather we laminated from our college days, even a faded thermal receipt that'll have us wondering about its origins (most of them quite likely to be Starbucks receipts for a Hazelnut Latte). It's sometimes not just a book we're reading, it's also a trip down Memory Lane.

When dad passed us Reader's Digest's 'Select Editions' that he has been getting to read, we come to realise how handy the binded ribbon bookmark was.

And so we decided to experiment with our book wrapping.

First time around, we made use of whatever materials we had on hand, which was Ikea's ISIG paper string...thingy.

We're not sure how functional it was as a bookmark tho'. We have yet to try it out.

Then we found another kind of ribbon, also from Ikea. This one felt much more suitable but the problem we have with this ribbon was that it was paper - which meant it creased rather easily. It sort of hampered our reading because we had to handle the bookmark with care while we read.

What we needed was something similar to that we came across in the Reader's Digest Select Editions. Narrow and made from polyester or something. Happily we found a roll of ribbon that would do in Papier, while shopping for more scrapbook paper for the sis.

Once we finish Saki, we'll be able to put this new bookmark to the test.

There, the evolution of book wrapping. Now with ribbon bookmark! What about in the future - pockets?