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Paul Robinson on bookmarks

Marking Time

Do you know where you put the window cleaner’s bill? Do you remember that you missed your last appointment at the dentist’s because you had mislaid her appointment card? When these things happen, do you put it down to just another senior moment or, perhaps, an indication of a worrying frequency of lapses in concentration, usually noted in older friends and relations? Might I suggest that you take a few moments to riffle through the last half-dozen books that you have read recently? You may be surprised at what you find.

As a subscriber to Slightly Foxed from Issue 1, I delight in the stories of the work that goes into the writing of books, but as a dealer in second-hand books I am more often surprised by what falls out of them.

Whenever I’m called in to clear a library, I try to form a mental picture of the late owner simply by looking at the book titles. These can indicate passions, sometimes even obsessions, but it is when the deal is done and I look at the books more closely that I begin to feel a very real connection with their previous owner.

I once bought a huge library of over 5,000 books, all of them in virtually mint condition. The daughter of the late owner, whose job it was to clear the house, said ‘Dad was a great reader. He was never without a book in his hand and he could never walk past a bookshop.’ The size of the collection and the fact that several books had been bought many times over – the record was five copies of Walking in the Munros – revealed that I was indeed in the company of an obsessive book-collector. However, his bookmarks told me that though he may have been an avid reader he was all too often distracted. I never found a bookmark that indicated he had got past p. 17 of any of his books. (I sometimes speculate as to why a bookmark has remained clamped in a particular place in a book. Was it an untimely visit by a ‘Person from Porlock’ or simply a milk pan boiling over?)

Bo

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Do you know where you put the window cleaner’s bill? Do you remember that you missed your last appointment at the dentist’s because you had mislaid her appointment card? When these things happen, do you put it down to just another senior moment or, perhaps, an indication of a worrying frequency of lapses in concentration, usually noted in older friends and relations? Might I suggest that you take a few moments to riffle through the last half-dozen books that you have read recently? You may be surprised at what you find.

As a subscriber to Slightly Foxed from Issue 1, I delight in the stories of the work that goes into the writing of books, but as a dealer in second-hand books I am more often surprised by what falls out of them. Whenever I’m called in to clear a library, I try to form a mental picture of the late owner simply by looking at the book titles. These can indicate passions, sometimes even obsessions, but it is when the deal is done and I look at the books more closely that I begin to feel a very real connection with their previous owner. I once bought a huge library of over 5,000 books, all of them in virtually mint condition. The daughter of the late owner, whose job it was to clear the house, said ‘Dad was a great reader. He was never without a book in his hand and he could never walk past a bookshop.’ The size of the collection and the fact that several books had been bought many times over – the record was five copies of Walking in the Munros – revealed that I was indeed in the company of an obsessive book-collector. However, his bookmarks told me that though he may have been an avid reader he was all too often distracted. I never found a bookmark that indicated he had got past p. 17 of any of his books. (I sometimes speculate as to why a bookmark has remained clamped in a particular place in a book. Was it an untimely visit by a ‘Person from Porlock’ or simply a milk pan boiling over?) Bookmarks come in many forms – decorated papyrus, silver, magnetic, silk-embroidered, tasselled, beribboned, knitted, plasticwrapped – and then of course there are those horrible gilt-embossed strips of fringed leather, souvenirs of days out, that are so damaging when left in books too long. More prosaically, I’ve also come across strips of kitchen roll, Kleenex and toilet tissue (the latter a telling indication of where the book might have been read). And I’ve lost count of the number of Kit-Kat wrappers I’ve discovered in books. Confectionary wrappers are often used as improvised bookmarks, but I think I can safely say that the Kit-Kat is by far and away the favourite. Some discoveries are inspiriting. Cataloguing books in the depths of winter I find my mood can suddenly be lifted by the sight of a thin wand of rye grass, a clover leaf or even a stem of palest blue forget-me-nots tucked between the pages. And it is not only flora that raise my spirits. Among my growing collection of objects that have tumbled out of books I have a dog-eared ticket from an omnibus journey to Clapham, obviously the property of a ‘reasonable man’. But a bookmark is not only an indicator, a stick thrust in the hedge of a literary journey, it is also a reflection of the passage of time. Sadly, too many of the bookmarks I’ve found bear the names of long gone and much-missed bookshops. Some years ago I visited one of those now defunct shops and asked if they had anything new in the military section. The bookseller motioned me to a small pile of cardboard boxes at the back of the shop, saying that he had just bought a collection from the family of an old gentleman who had died. I was free to go through them but he had not yet priced them. I selected a dozen or so books and, after some haggling, settled on a price of £40. When I got home I set to work valuing them. Among them was a rare copy of The Narrow Margin, an illustrated history of the Battle of Britain, but my heart sank when I saw that many of the pages were speckled with inked marginalia. Then I looked more closely. The marginalia were in fact the signatures of fifteen Battle of Britain pilots, no doubt collected at reunions or air shows. These greatly enhanced the book’s resale value. But perhaps the biggest surprise came when I reached the last book in the pile. As I flipped through it, four crisp new £10 notes fell out. Maybe the original owner had put them there for safe-keeping while waiting to pay a gardener or a cleaner, and then forgotten them. At any rate they were worth more than the 50,000 Deutschmark note I once discovered in another collection. The banknote had been issued immediately after the First World War during a period of hyperinflation: it had been practically worthless then, and was no more valuable when I found it. Some bookmarks are poignant: in a copy of Laurie Lee’s exquisite collection of verse The Bloom of Candles (1947), I came across a short letter from a father to his son, dated 24 April 1948: ‘I am sure that this is small enough to go into your kit bag. You may find it a comfort as I did with other verses.’ Who knows, perhaps the son was on his way to Malaya and his father had recently returned from the Second World War. Strangely touching was a postcard that fell out of a book on weaving, written by a husband to his wife who was attending a weavers’ course in the Hebrides. In a tiny script he listed all the jobs he had done in her absence – grass-cutting, weeding, cooking – and then one or two tasks that he had been unable to complete. He ended with a heartfelt wish that her course was going well and told her how much he was looking forward to her return. Not all my finds have been melancholy. In a huge theatrical collection that still rates as one of my worst buys, I discovered an amorous correspondence from one ageing thespian to another on postcards depicting John Gielgud, Michael Redgrave, Cole Porter and Noël Coward. The choice of postcard was as revealing as the terms of endearment on the back of each. As a collector of books by and about the late Poet Laureate Sir John Betjeman I was one day delighted to come upon an otherwise undistinguished copy of his blank verse autobiography Summoned by Bells. It was in the Reader’s Union Book Club edition, published two years after the first edition and lacking its dust wrapper. I was not surprised that it had been overlooked by other browsers. When I opened the book I was delighted to find it had been signed by the author on the half-title. Under the words ‘Summoned by Bells’ he had written ‘& eyes’ followed by a drawing of two disembodied eyes and then ‘& John Betjeman 1962 Barts’. Then I began to leaf through and out fell a coloured postcard of Southend pier with a short cheery note on his journey and a promise to visit when next he was at Barts. Dated 1960, it was addressed to someone in Percival Potts Ward at St Bartholomew’s Hospital. Much later, when I read the second volume of Bevis Hillier’s biography of Betjeman, John Betjeman: New Fame, New Love, I discovered that, unbeknown to his family and friends, the poet would go regularly on Thursdays to St Bartholomew’s Hospital from his home in Cloth Fair. After taking tea with the nursing sisters he visited their patients, many of them suffering from terminal cancer, and, with his wonderful gifts of mimicry and self-deprecating humour, would cheer everyone up. From the late nineteenth century the bookmark was seen by commercial companies as valuable advertising space. These miniature hoardings would be viewed hundreds of times over, implanting their brand names firmly in readers’ minds. The oldest bookmark I have discovered, which probably dates from 1897, is a modest strip of card bearing advertisements for Sunlight Soap, Aitchison’s Spectacles and Eyeglasses, Beetham’s Glycerine & Cucumber Face Cream (‘Always Fair, Almost Magical’) and the Birkbeck Bank The Birkbeck Bank, established in 1851, had a balance sheet of £12.26 million and 112,500 accounts in 1910 but then suffered a run and, despite the support of the Bank of England, went into receivership. In 1911 the goodwill and premises were purchased from the receiver by the London County and Westminster Bank which eventually became part of the Royal Bank of Scotland . . . which just goes to show that what goes around comes around. So, on behalf of all second-hand booksellers, one of whom may one day be handling your books, may I ask that you never, ever turn the page corners down or use the dust-wrapper flap to mark your place. Always use a bookmark: your secrets will be safe with us.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 39 © Paul Robinson 2013


About the contributor

Paul Robinson has been involved in books ever since he left school – as a retailer, wholesaler and publisher. Since his recent retirement he has devoted himself full-time to buying and selling second-hand books as a means of legitimately smuggling more books into the house without his wife knowing.

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