Entry tags:
Found objects
Reading my library book today, I came across a bookmark. Not my own, but one left there from a previous borrower. I have a great number of bookmarks – almost as many as I have books – but I have a special fondness for these found ones, thin card keeping place diligently but fruitlessly. I reclaim them and put them to good use. Not the posh ones, obviously, which I return to the library. This one advertised an aquarium and was shaped like a fish at the top. I like to imagine the person who once visited the aquarium and then read a book about a Chinese girl and her pet dragon. My favourite of these bookmarks is the piece of cardboard carefully cut from a box of basmati rice, featuring blue-skinned Krishna and his many arms, and marking the page of a book on the Industrial Revolution.
No such offbeat combinations for me. I like to match the book to the bookmark. So my place in the book about the Chinese girl and her dragon was kept by a bookmark of delicate cut paper, featuring a panda, bought from a seller on the Great Wall by my Year 7 teacher, Mrs Bastow. She went to China for a holiday and brought back these bookmarks for all the class. I never had her for another class after Year 7, and she died some years ago, but the memory of her holiday lives on. Now I’m reading a book on Greek mythology and my place is marked by a mock papyrus of Ra surrounded by hieroglyphs.
No such offbeat combinations for me. I like to match the book to the bookmark. So my place in the book about the Chinese girl and her dragon was kept by a bookmark of delicate cut paper, featuring a panda, bought from a seller on the Great Wall by my Year 7 teacher, Mrs Bastow. She went to China for a holiday and brought back these bookmarks for all the class. I never had her for another class after Year 7, and she died some years ago, but the memory of her holiday lives on. Now I’m reading a book on Greek mythology and my place is marked by a mock papyrus of Ra surrounded by hieroglyphs.