The Emily Blog

For this week’s edition of Weekly Geeks, I’d like to focus on one of the most useful tools for a bibliophile: Bookmarks. Do you use bookmarks or just grab whatever is handy to mark your page? Do you collect lots of different bookmarks or do you have a favorite one that you use exclusively? If you’re not someone who uses bookmarks on a regular basis, have you ever used anything odd to mark your place?

Okay, I think this is the first Weekly Geeks thing I’ve done. It caught my eye because I’m currently going through an enormous paradigm shift in my life with regard to bookmarks (is that dramatic enough?!). The thing is, I ALWAYS used to turn down pages – and yes, my mom would squawk at me – I did it because it was convenient, I was constantly zooming through books, and bookmarks got lost. Now I think I’m growing up, or something weird like that. I still zoom through some books, but others I’m more leisurely about, especially collections of short stories. And if a book is thick enough, it’s a little tricky finding that one dog-eared page, especially if a handful of others are already creased or wrinkled.

So bookmarks have been on my mind lately. I’ve started using business cards (my own, which I have way too many of) as temporary bookmarks but now I’m thinking I want something prettier, and maybe with some meaning. I dug through an old shoebox, thinking I might find some old bookmarks I’d received as gifts, and – lo and behold – I found one! My only bookmark. It’s a special one, too – my friend from southern China gave it to me, and it has writing on it in the Naxi Dongba script.

This is a good start.