Blogging Bookmarks

by

Lauren Roberts

About once a month I google “BiblioBuffet” just to see what shows up. On one of those early research trips, I was astounded to find a connection to a blog I had not heard of before—Bookmark Collector. I was particularly thrilled because most of the time, when you google “bookmarks,” you get articles and links that reference the online definition. But here was a blog about the real thing!

It proved to be an interesting read (and is one of the sites to which I link), but it turned doubly so when I discovered the writer lives in my hometown. I made contact with Alan Irwin, and though we have yet to meet we have chatted several times. He is unusually interesting as a person and a collector, and I thought BiblioBuffet’s readers would enjoy getting to know him too.
 
Who is Alan? What is he like?
Oh wow! You jump right in. Okay, I'll start with some basic facts. I’m 51 years old. I live in Santa Barbara, California with Harriet, my partner of 22 years. No kids but 2 dogs we dote on. I’m a software engineer by trade, but I have a lot of avocations. I’m probably best known currently as a teacher and performer of improvisational comedy, but over the years I’ve also done a lot of social service work. Harriet and I like to travel and have been all over the world. I’m a woodworker, primarily woodturning, but I’ve done a variety of crafts over the years. I make kinetic sculptures, and lately I’ve been making puppets. And, of course, I’m a collector—currently focused on comic books, slide rules and bookmarks. And there are a lot of other hobbies and interests. I like to say that my hobby is hobbies.

Tell us about your professional background.
I’m a software engineer working for a company that builds infrared test equipment. How’s that for an obscure industry? Infrared cameras “see” heat and are used to see in the dark. They have traditionally been used by the military (I have security clearances), but are also used by police and fire departments in civilian applications. The technology is getting cheaper, so they are being put into more common applications including cars (which aid nighttime driving). Our company doesn’t make the cameras, we make the equipment used to test and calibrate the cameras. I’m one of a handful of infrared camera testing experts in the world—which makes me laugh whenever I say it because how much more obscure can you get?

And the answer is that I can get just a bit more obscure since I also draw a comic strip for the newsletter we send to our customers. That means infrared camera testing comedy—a very limited audience.

When and how did you get interested in bookmarks? What appeals to you about them?
Oh good, back to something people are actually interested in! It’s hard to say when I started; over the years I’d pick up souvenir bookmarks and they’d just accumulate. Probably 15 years ago I bought a paper bookmark from one of those antique malls. It was from 1928, and I was fascinated by the history of it. I think that’s when I really stated “collecting.”

I see bookmarks as small samples of culture that carry lots of different stories and meanings. They have a literary connection (they mark your place in a book), but they are also advertisements, teaching aids, art pieces and craft projects. They give us glimpses into history, make us laugh and smile, remind us of events, places, or entertainments, and are utilitarian. They can be cheap (free!) and expensive, ugly and beautiful, useful and impractical, mass produced and handmade, meaningful and inconsequential. How cool is that!

How many bookmarks do you have in your collection?
Several years ago I did a count and had about 300. Now I’m probably closer to 600, nowhere near the likes of Laine Farley who has something like 3,000 in her collection.

What was your first bookmark?
I probably have bookmarks from when I was a kid. The first one I can remember buying as a collectable was a paper advertising bookmark from 1928. It opened up like a book and had this great graphic of a red-headed woman playing a saxophone.
 
Where do you find your bookmarks?
It seems like I find them everywhere. I grab free bookmarks wherever they show up. I buy souvenir bookmarks on my travels. I find them at yard sales and antique malls. I'll buy them from artists and from bookstores and, of course, eBay. Recently I've been doing a lot of trading with other collectors and crafters around the world.

How do you store and display your bookmark collection?
Ack! This is currently my biggest issue, and probably what differentiates a “collector” from an “accumulator” (my distinction). I have a drawer in my office where all my bookmarks first find a home. From there, they get sorted into the collection. I’ve been experimenting with storage methods, and for the majority of paper bookmarks, they are in a thick binder with plastic sheets originally made to hold film negatives. I also have a variety of stiff plastic sleeves which I use to protect more valuable paper bookmarks. The other bookmarks—metal, plastic, wood, etc.—are in a set of utility drawers dedicated to my bookmarks.

To my shame, I'm not currently displaying the bookmarks. I take them out to show specific items. I admire the ways other collectors display their collections and would like to do something similar. I have lots of plans but not enough time.

Do you have them separated into categories?
The paper bookmarks are basically divided into categories in the pages of my binder. Those categories are based on the topics of the images and captions—libraries, reading, books, television & movies, advertising, etc. The other bookmarks are stored in the drawers based on the materials they’re made from—metal, wood, fabric, etc.
 
Do you keep a database of information about your bookmarks?
I have in the past, but I find that I don’t keep up with it. That’s probably telling me that I was tracking too much information. All I really want to do is retain the stories around the most interesting bookmarks: souvenirs, handmade bookmarks, antiques, that sort of thing.

Do you have a particular sub-interest in bookmarks such as 19th century or metal ones?
Not really. Like I mentioned before, I see bookmarks as small slices of culture, so I’m equally interested in antique or hand-made or free advertising bookmarks.
 
Do you have any preferences?
I prefer anything with a good story behind it.
 
Do you own any books or have any articles on bookmark collecting?
Hah! That’s its own form of collection. I keep links to online articles (the best BY FAR are at a great web site called BiblioBuffet—try googling it). And I have a couple of books on bookmark collecting. I have A.W. Coysh’s Collecting Bookmarkers, and I just bought the book Lesezeichen Sammeln (Bookmark Collecting in German) by Karl Heinz Steinbeißer. It has an amazing collection of pictures but the text is in German, which I don’t speak or read. So I’ll get bits and pieces translated as I need them.

Do you give presentations to places such as schools or retirement homes about bookmarks or your collection? Have you had any bookmark exhibits?
I haven’t yet, and I admire those who do get out with their collections. I’d like to organize subsets of my collection into little exhibits. I think they’d tell some compelling stores.

Do you use them when you read? Are there any you won't use? Why or why not?
I use some of them, and I would not use any of the antiques. I also find that a lot of the sculptural pieces are nice to look at but aren’t really practical for marking my place in a book.

 

There’s a particular bookmark that I think is the best ever designed, and I use it all the time. It has a clip for attaching to the back cover of the book, and a spring wire which saves your current page. It’s easy to flip pages with the spring wire in place, and I can put the book down at any time and have my place automatically saved. The spring wire is so small that none of the text is blocked with it in place. I bought five of them, and now I can’t find them for sale anymore. Those bookmarks have been all over the world with me.

What is the least and most you’ve ever paid for a bookmark? What was so important about the most expensive one that made you willing to pay the price?
So far, the least expensive has been free (I don’t think anyone has paid me to take away a bookmark, yet) and there are a lot of those. The most expensive was probably a Stevengraph Silk bookmark from the late 1800s, and I believe I paid $75 for that. I was willing to pay that price because it’s a piece of history for me and has a powerful story.

Bookmark prices have risen noticeably in the last couple of years for the more collectible or antique ones. Do you think that’s a good or bad trend?
I don’t know that I have a strong opinion one way or another. Higher prices means there are more collectors, and that’s generally a good thing. But that also means I can’t afford as much. I don’t think that pricing really limits a collector. There are so many great ways to collect bookmarks with very little cost.

How did the Bookmark Collector blog come about? How did you come up with the idea?
I guess I wasn’t finding the kind of information I wanted about collecting bookmarks. I was looking for advice about organizing, displaying, etc. In most of my other interests, I can find great information on-line and particularly in blogs. I guess I saw the need for bookmark information at the same time I was becoming interested in blogging. Within a few months I had started three different blogs, one of which is the Bookmark Collector (I also have an improv blog and a personal blog that includes photos and updates from our trips).
 
Why did you start Bookmark Collector?
One key component was accountability. I either had to make my pile of bookmarks a “real” collection, or just admit that it was an accumulating pile of obsession. By publishing my progress and discoveries, I’m constantly recommitting myself to the collection.

Do you enjoy writing it?
I do. Writing isn’t easy for me, and one of my goals when I started the blog was to practice my writing. Every bit of writing instruction and advice I come across starts and ends with “DO IT.” The only way to get better is to write, so the blog forces me to do that, and to do it publicly.

Do you hear from other bookmark collectors?
I do, although it’s not much more than “Hello.” My next goal for the blog is to get some dialog happening. I think I see a lack of that in the forums I follow. They tend to be about exchanges, with a lot of “Thanks” and “These are great” messages—which is wonderful—but I’d like to see folks talk more about how they display their collections, their storage and database systems, news, discoveries, etc. So I think I’m going to make an effort to encourage that in the future.
 
Do you think bookmarks are underrated in terms of historical value?
Underrated? I suppose, but history tends to be so underrated in general that I’m reluctant to single out bookmarks. I just read a great article on the history of dialog balloons in comics, which have origins in certain renaissance paintings. History can be found in almost everything that surrounds us.

Ouch, too philosophical.
 
What do you think bookmarks tell us about history or ourselves?
Oh man, you are just determined to get profound statements about bookmarks out of me. I think that bookmarks, as small—almost insignificant accessories to our lives—allow us to embellish them with a diverse set of bite-sized peeks into our world and our culture, and in so doing, serves as a record documenting the changes and evolution of our culture. And they’re cool.

You like to travel. Do you make a point of looking for bookmarks at places you visit?
Absolutely! They’re inexpensive souvenirs and are easy to carry. They can be small samples of local handcrafts; they can contain information about local sites or wildlife or history; and they’re useful.
 
Have you ever gone any place specifically to find bookmarks?
I’ve not gone anywhere just for bookmarks. I’ve gone to book fairs and conferences and known that I’d come away with a bunch of free bookmarks.

 

Tell us about your time in Africa watching bookmarks being made.
That was serendipitous. We were in Madagascar, and when looking over the guide book about the town we were in, we found that there was a papermaking factory. Everything was handmade, from pulping the bark to cutting the paper off of the drying racks. One of the products made with this process was bookmarks, and so I bought a couple of them. There’s a longer description along with photos on my blog. It was one of those great travel moments that I relive whenever I see those particular bookmarks,

In your experience, do foreign-made bookmarks differ from American-made ones? If so, how?
That question is pretty complicated to answer because the world is a pretty big place. There are places I’ve bought bookmarks where they were clearly made for the tourist trade because there’s no indigenous tradition of using bookmarks. I have a great Chinese “bookmark” that was really used as a tongue scraper (Laine just wrote about these!).

I’ve noticed that in many European and South American collections, they have bookmark series that fit together like a puzzle. I’ve only seen that in trading card sets in the U.S., not in bookmarks. They look great.

           

What are some of your favorite bookmarks?
This was a difficult choice. Right now, my favorite fell out of a book at an estate sale. Since I was buying some other items, the dealer gave it to me for free. I liked the image on it, and it looked moderately old, and I didn’t think any more about it until I got home. Well, after discovering it had a date of 1919, I researched the references to verify the date. It came from the Women’s Educational and Industrial Union, an organization founded in the 1870s by the first woman physician in Boston. They organized women into unions before women had the right to vote, provided education and resources for children, and a lot of other services I had never heard of before. An amazing find!

Also, the bookmark from Madagascar is very special since we visited the small home factory where it was made, and watched them making paper. It’s created from handmade paper and decorated with embedded local flowers. And, my first real “collectors” bookmark is special—a paper folding advertising bookmark promoting the Parisian Red Heads, an “all girl band.” from 1928.
 
Do you know of anyone who has ever taken up collecting bookmarks because your collection excited them about bookmarks?
Not yet, but that would be cool!

Tell me anything you'd like that I haven't thought to ask.
I think the Internet has opened up the possibilities in bookmark collecting. Worldwide swaps have become much easier, especially with sites like Yahoo’s Collecting Bookmarks and Swap-bot. Hand-crafted bookmarks are getting a lot more exposure, partly with the craft-oriented swaps available but also with the explosion of online crafting at sites like Craftzine.com and About.com, as well as marketplaces like Etsy.com and eBay . Information sites are popping up, from survey and news sites like the Bookmark Collector as well as deep information sites like BiblioBuffet.

Bookmark specifications: Parisian Red Heads
 Dimensions (in inches): 3” x 5 1/2” (fully opened)
 Material: Paper
 Manufacturer: Parisian Red heads
 Date: 1994
 Acquired (from/location): Antique mall in Santa Barbara, CA

Bookmark specifications: PageKeeper
 Dimensions: 2 1/4” x 2” (including wire clip)
 Material: Metal
 Manufacturer: The Piedmont Group
 Date: 1996
 Acquired: Bookstore in Redwood City, CA

Bookmark specifications: Madagascar
 Dimensions: 2 1/2” x 7 1/2”
 Material: Handmade paper and flower petals
 Manufacturer: mall paper manufacturer in Madagascar
 Date: 2005
 Acquired: Manufacturer in Madagascar

Bookmark specifications: Patriotism
 Dimensions (in inches): 2 1/4” x 6 3/4”
 Material: Paper
 Manufacturer: Women's Educational and Industrial Union
 Date:  2007
 Acquired (from/location): Estate Sale, Santa Barbara, CA

Almost since her childhood days of, Lauren has been giving her opinion on books to anyone who will listen. That “talent” eventually took her out of magazine writing and into book reviewing in 2000 for an online review site where she cut her teeth (as well as a few authors). Stints as book editor for her local newspaper and contributing editor toandmagazines has reinforced her belief that she has interesting things to say about books. Lauren shares her home with several significant others including three cats, 900 bookmarks and approximately 1,000 books that, whether previously read or not, constitute her to-be-read stack. She is a member of the National Books Critics Circle (NBCC) and Book Publicists of Southern California as well as a longtime book design judge for Publishers Marketing Association’s Benjamin Franklin Awards. You can reach her at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it