Herein, I return to the issue of the bookmark I have mentioned in passing once or twice. In the earlier post, I mention having misplaced a particular bookmark. Nearly two months since later, amidst packing things for the upcoming move, I have found it again, and I am glad to have done so.
The bookmark itself is an older one and in disrepair. Its laminated glossy cardstock, carrying an image of Michael Whelan's illustration for the cover of Melanie Rawn's Sunrunner's Fire, is cracking and has been taped together repeatedly. The red threads of the tassel that once topped it have long since fallen away, with only the small tether that once held them to the marker remaining threaded through the hole I have had to piece back into place time and again (and will likely need to yet again before long). The lamination itself is peeling apart, and the printed words on the back of the mark are fading.
Even so, I have no intention of discarding it, for that bookmark and I have a long history. It was a gift to me from my grandmother, herself an avid reader, when I was twelve or so. At the time, I was heavily engaged in reading, not just comic books and what might as well have been pulp novels, but classic works of science fiction (particularly Asimov) and fantasy literature (especially Tolkien), and even the "great" works of the English-language literary canon; it was not too much later that I was given my first copies of Beowulf, Paradise Lost, and The Divine Comedy (texts I still have, in fact). I was then in the habit of dog-earing my books when I remembered to put them down, and I would often fall asleep with book in hand, creasing the pages and losing my place as I lost my wakefulness and fell into a sleep whose dreams were never much recalled.
The bookmark was a welcome change. I had just begun to understand the value of the book not merely as a vehicle for the carrying of text, but as an object worth valuing in its own right, and I began to realize that turning the pages on themselves as I had been doing did much to reduce that value. Being able to keep my place without inflicting such upon what were for several reasons becoming my most treasured possessions thrilled me. Being able to do so with something that itself looked to be a piece of artwork--Whelan's technique is admirable now, and to my pre-teen eyes, it was astounding--was itself a thrill.
Looking back, it seems to me now that having the bookmark meant I had become a more serious reader. Not only did I have the books themselves, but I had materials to help me read the books--tools to make me better at reading. I grew up among tradesfolk and artisans, masters of crafts and disciplines, and I knew that a large part of mastery was having the right equipment and the understanding of how and when to use it. The bookmark was a piece of that for me, an outward and visible sign that I had grown more masterful in my ability to recognize and interpret words on a page.
I have other such signs, now, and much more powerful and widely recognized. I take pride in them, perhaps more than I ought. But I am still pleased to have found my old, good bookmark once again.
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