Bookish Questions – Do you use bookmarks a lot?
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Do you use bookmarks a lot?
ALL THE TIME! I have an assortment of bookmarks in my collection. Some are bookmarks I got for free from places like Barnes & Noble or Book Depository, while others are ones I have made. Some of my favorite ones I’ve done myself are the ones I printed from Quirk Books for Banned Books Week last year. I printed mine on some yellow cardstock I found at the office to make them super cool.
I’ve also recently picked up my grandmother’s habit of using the perfume samples from magazines as bookmarks. They tend to be just the right width form making a good bookmark, but are very tall, so I can sometimes get 2 bookmarks from one sample.
Do you make your own bookmarks, use store-bought ones, or just use whatever is handy?
If it’s a book with a lot of end notes, I use those bright stick-on strips so I can flip to the section I want quickly. Recently I’ve been reading ancient Japanese literature like The Pillow Book and Sharashina Diary, and those little strips save my sanity! I also use them when marking grammar books so when I’m tutoring a student I can just flip to the section I want without having to go to the index.
I have two beautiful bookmarks that came with paperbacks from The Book Depository; one I actually had laminated because it is so cute! They are customer art, apparently. (Have to see if I can snap a pic an share it with you). Otherwise, yeah, I just grab any piece of junk mail etc, or a piece of scrap paper torn or folded.
My mother was death on bookmarks when I was a kid; she used to say if I needed a marker in a novel I hadn’t been paying attention anyway…and she would take any markers away if she saw them! (My mother was weird.) So when I was a kid, I would mark my place by slipping a bobby pin over the edge of the page, near the binding. Nice and discreet!
That’s hilarious! End notes like that would be the death of me. I much prefer books with footnotes on each page as needed.
The copy I have of The Sarashina Diary has more front-matter and end notes than actual text!! I am annoyed. Because yes, we need cultural notes to understand Heian Japan. But we do NOT need 100 pages of “look at me” before we get to the meat of the book! If you want to tell allll about how you decided to do a new translation, and how yours is so much better than those that have gone before, and how you went about it, do that–but in an appendix at the end, please. I speak as a translator myself; it’s not about us, it’s about making the text shine.
If you can get The Pillow Book by Sei Shonagon in the fabulous, deliciously readable translation by Meredith McKinney, do that! I think you’d love it. And I bet it’s in your university library.