How Do I Display Thee? Let Me Find The Way.byLauren Roberts
As collectibles go, they are relatively small items. Unlike dolls or ceramics or pottery, bookmarks take up little room especially if you only own, as I currently do, around 700. However, I am getting more all the time so I expect to someday have the same problem as Laine Farley who co-writes this column and owns more than 3,000. We are fortunate in that we don’t need shelves and walls for our collections. But we do want to enjoy them, and for me, how to store and display them has been a problem since I began collecting, and one that took months to solve.
Since I’ve never been a collector of anything prior to bookmarks—even books, though I have lots of those—I didn’t know what to do with my collection once it outgrew its third box. I didn’t want to use anything that put them out of daily reach because I like to use my bookmarks the way they were meant to be used, to mark my place in books I am reading.
A friend of mine is enthralled with the fact that any time I begin a book, I go through my entire collection searching out exactly the right bookmark for that particular one. Some examples: I used a red maple leaf for Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods. There could be no bookmark more appropriate for this account of a backpacking trip along the Appalachian trail. For Hotel Kid—next week’s reviewed selection—I chose a bookmark (circa 1955) from the Admiral Hotel in San Diego. Occasionally, at night, when I am rereading one of the Sherlock Holmes stories, I use a bookmark issued by the St. Louis PBS station during Pledge Week in 1991. It has an illustration of Reichenbach Falls and is signed by Jeremy Brett, the most celebrated SH actor to date. And for Space Tourism: Adventures in Earth Orbit and Beyond (one of the many books I am dipping into at night), I have an old metal bookmark from the 1939 World’s Fair, which is still on its original card and shows a visionary image space. When my growing collection threatened to topple over, I knew I had to find a new solution. I also had to keep them out of the way of my playful cats who find the tassels on some of them irresistible. Plus, many are fragile and need protection. All those were important factors, but what I wanted most of all was a way to display them which would allow me to enjoy them without the effort of emptying them one by one onto a table until it was time to put them back into their box. I considered several options. Framing was the first. But framing meant the bookmarks would have to be somehow attached to the board. And many if not most of the bookmarks are printed on both sides. Even if I could figure out a way to attach them without damaging them, their sheer number meant that I would need lots of wall space. And then they would not be available for easy use. I next turned my thoughts toward coffee tables and side tables that have built-in display areas. These pieces of furniture have space with room for objects under the glass top. I’ve seen these in other people’s homes, and noticed they looked nice. This idea did solve a couple of problems; I could get at the bookmarks easily and it would keep them clean and safe from feline paws. But putting lamps and coffee table books on them (which I would do because otherwise where would my excess books go?) would block them from view, not to mention that their space, and therefore their usefulness, is limited. Onward then. One evening I was flipping through an old photo album in which my mother had used tiny black photo triangles to hold the pictures in place. Of course!, I nearly shrieked aloud. Why hadn’t I thought of googling photographs or postcards and seeing what was made for those? After a quick self-administered boink on the head, I fired up the computer and headed for Google. It took several attempts, but I soon found myself at a page that listed place after place with archival storage suppliers. Why is it important to find archival quality materials when I could just run down to the local office supplies superstore and buy albums, paper and plastic inserts? Because the acid used in non-archival materials is damaging over the long term. Archival materials are acid free, specifically designed to protect their precious contents from their two main enemies: ultraviolet rays and acid that is produced by human skin, wood and wood-based products. 
This was exactly what I was looking for! I spent several evenings over the course of a week looking through various sites and their products. Eventually I went with a box-like binder from Archival Methods (see image above) with three “D” rings that hold plastic inserts. Inside each insert I put two 8 1/2” x 11” black cardstock pages, and on those are my bookmarks, proudly attached via updated versions of those black triangles—clear plastic (archival quality, of course) photo corners.
Web sites: These sites offer this binder and other archival items. Local scrapbook shops are also excellent places to find archival cardstock or paper as well as the photo corners. |
