Origins of the Bookmark

by

Frank X. Roberts

While comparatively little has been written about bookmarks, thousands, indeed millions, of words have been written about books:  their origin, their history and their development, in monographs and in numerous essays.  In The Book Before Printing, Ancient: Medieval and Oriental, David Diringer, a leading authority on the history of books, admits to a “perplexity” in finding “in a welter . . . [of] cause and effect” a probable origin for the book. Diringer selects two places in the Middle East as possible “birth places” for the book—Mesopotamia and the Valley of the Nile River in Egypt. He concludes that “. . . anyone wishing to study the history of ‘the book’ must take as a starting place the earliest known ‘books’ i.e., the baked clay tablets of Mesopotamia and the papyrus rolls of Egypt.” Perhaps in these places, too, might be found the origin of bookmarks.

Archeologists have unearthed numerous clay tablets with cuneiform (wedge-shaped) writing on them. The triangular cuneiform letters on the tablets were impressed into the soft clay of the tablets before they were baked to harden them. Scribes used a stylus of metal, ivory or wood to incise the letters. Some collections of these tablets have been found to comprise lengthy “books” using both surfaces of the tablets as “pages.” Stacks of clay tablets have been discovered in which the top tablet of the stack “bore the title page of the work.”
 
Many of these baked-clay books have been deciphered and annotated by scholars, and published for use by students who are not “Assyriologists.” But what archeology and scholarship cannot tell, and probably will never be able to tell, is whether or not readers of clay-tablet books in antiquity used any kind of device between the clay-tablet “pages” of their “books” to mark a place where they had to stop reading. Might they have used a handy metal, wooden or ivory stylus, or a piece of straw or a strip of cloth or leather to mark their place when reading was interrupted, or to mark some especially interesting passage they planned to return to later? We can only speculate, but given that human nature changes hardly at all in some things, such a scenario in the ancient past is a distinct possibility.
 
The “books” of Egyptian civilization, in a complete contrast to the clay-tablet books of Mesopotamia, were made from the papyrus plant which grew along the banks of the Nile River, and which produced a much lighter, softer and more flexible medium for writing. Finished papyrus sheets were glued together to form what are known as “roll-books,” some more than 70 feet long. Rolls of papyrus were wound about a rod called the umbulicus because it was in the center of the wound-up roll-book when the roll was stored and ready for reading. The text of a roll-book was written in columns and each section of a roll looked very much like the individual pages of a modern book. The columns rolled out before the reader’s eyes as reading progressed.
 
Nevertheless, scanning or “leafing” through large roll-books to find a marked place or a previously read passage must have been an almost impossible, if unavoidable, task. Clipping, or attaching in some manner, a “bookmark” to a roll-book so that the marker would stick out at the top edge of the roll at a particular column or passage, might have been an option for marking a place in a roll-book, but if that was ever done, it is not mentioned by any scholar or student of reading in the ancient world. No roll-book has as yet been found with such a device attached.

The light, more flexible roll-books of Egypt were an advance over the heavy clay-tablet books of Mesopotamia, and a much more effective format in which to present and to store text. Yet the roll-book was still not the ideal format for presenting text, storing text, consulting text or for use as a quick-reference source. A better method or format was needed, and this, the next advance in the development of the book, came in the form of the “codex” or “leaf-book”: a compilation of pages made of papyrus or vellum and closely resembling the format of the book as we know it today.
 
The parchment codex was developed from the wooden writing tablets used by the Romans. These wooden tablets were covered with wax to make a soft writing surface.  When two or more of these waxed tablets were joined together by cords tied through holes in one of their edges, the result was called a codex. Eventually, the wood and wax construction of these writing tablets was replaced by thinner and more flexible materials.

According to Colin Roberts in The Birth of the Codex, “. . . the crucial date in the history of the codex is circa A.D. 300, when the codex achieved parity with the roll.”  By the fifth century the codex had almost completely replaced all other forms of the book. “Thereafter,” says Roberts, “the codex form remained unaltered for more than a thousand years, until the twin developments of paper and printing transformed it into the book of today.”
 
It has been suggested that one reason for the ascendancy of the codex in the early Middle Ages was the facility with which individuals engaged in biblical and theological debate (at a time when books were generally without pagination or indexing) could turn swiftly to marked pages and passages in widely separated parts of a book or text from which they were drawing their arguments. This suggestion has, no doubt, some truth to it.  But a more mundane reason, and therefore a reason probably encompassing more of the truth, is that expressed by William V. Harris in Ancient Literacy, “. . . the vital difference,” says Harris, “plainly is that one can put markers between the pages of a codex.” But whatever the reason, with the more or less universal adoption of the codex form of the book, bookmarks, so to speak, came into their own.
 
The very first use of a bookmark in a codex or leaf-book is lost in the dark recesses of time. But it is perhaps ironic that St. Augustine who “waxed so lyrical about the great harbour of memory” where “things perceived are there ready at hand for thought to recall” should in his Confessions (written about 380 A.D.) provide us with what is probably the earliest recorded mention of the use of a physical bookmark—in this case a loose or portable one—in a codex.

Colin Roberts alludes to this use of a bookmark by St. Augustine in what he calls “the famous ‘Tolle, lege’ episode in the Confessions.” Here, Roberts says, “[Augustine] kept a finger in the codex of the Pauline Epistles to mark the place of the providential passage he had found.” But what Roberts fails to mention is that Augustine, in The Confessions of St. Augustine, actually says, “Then, having inserted my finger, or with some other mark  I closed the book.” But, alas, what that “other mark” was we shall never know. The important element of this story from the distant past for our purposes is that St. Augustine has provided history with written evidence (indeed, the word of a saint) that as early as the fourth century A.D. a (portable) bookmark of some type was used to mark a place between the pages of his book. It would, perhaps, not be much a stretch of the imagination to picture many readers in the early centuries A.D. doing the same thing as St. Augustine, that is putting some handy piece of material between the pages when their reading was interrupted. In fact, some of these pieces of string, straw, leather, vellum or whatever are still occasionally found by scholars doing research in ancient bound manuscripts. But most have undoubtedly now all turned to dust and blown away like the sands of the Egyptian desert. And as with our knowledge of the exact start of the binding of medieval manuscript books, our knowledge of just when parchment or leather bookmarks first made their appearance in these manuscripts is also buried beneath the dusty layers of time.
 
However, by the thirteenth century it appears that many innovative “tools” and study aids were being introduced into medieval texts. These tools made it easier for readers to find their way about in books, and to retrieve information more readily from the text. Among them were the numbering of pages, tables of contents, alphabetical subject indexes and the division of books into chapters.  Also employed were a wide variety of physical bookmarks used in conjunction with numbering, lettering and other marks on the leaves of manuscripts. Some of these physical bookmarks, leather thongs called “registers” can still be found attached to the head-bands of bound manuscript books in libraries in England and in Europe.
 
But modern research seems to agree that for the most likely place and time of origin of the decorative leather bindings of medieval manuscripts, “all indications point to Egypt” where, in the seventh century A.D., Christian Coptic monks brought the bindings of manuscripts to a state “of consummate artistry" and “exploit[ed] in an astonishing variety the decorative possibilities of leather” (according to Dorothy Miner in The  History of Bookbinding).

 Examples of the “artistry” of the Coptic Monks, dating from between the seventh and tenth century A.D. are preserved, and can be seen, in the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York City. Most of these decorative leather bindings are from the library of the Coptic monastery of St. Michael of the Desert in the Fayum in Northern Egypt. There and in other monasteries in the Egyptian desert, the monks worked tirelessly on their beautiful manuscript bindings. Sewn into the spines of books of gospels and other holy books used by the monks are the remnants of leather thongs or cords which provide the evidence for the very early use of bookmarks in bound medieval manuscripts. There can be little doubt that these vellum cords or thongs attached to the binding of manuscripts were not only decorative features but also register bookmarks designed to help the monks relocate with ease where their reading had left off or to find those passages in the gospels which they wished to re-read and to contemplate.
 
Over the centuries these bookmarks wore down with age and with use, so that within most of the decorative bindings of manuscripts from this early period the thongs or cords remain only as short stubs of leather, mere traces of what they once were. When new, and marking a page or a passage in a codex book, these bookmarks stretched their length from the head-band of the bound manuscript to which they were attached to beyond the bottom of its pages or leaves. These stubs, as well as those loose pieces of vellum or string or straw still found in some manuscript books, are now mute witnesses to the fact that physical bookmarks have been a presence in codex books as constant, helpful memory aids for readers at least since the seventh century A.D. and probably well before.

Frank is a semi-regular contributor to BiblioBuffet. His extensive career in teaching and librarianship began when he taught English in the U.S. From 1961 to 1963, as part of a Columbia University program called “Teachers for East Africa,” he taught English and American Literature in East Africa. There he met his wife, Dorothy. They returned to the U.S. where he simultaneously taught and finished two Masters’ degrees in Education and in Librarianship. In 1968 they returned to England where Frank taught Library Studies, and adopted Hodge, a cat who later traveled around the world with them. In 1972, Frank was “seconded” for two years to teach at Makerere University in Uganda, East Africa, but left reluctantly after one year when the tyranny of Idi Amin became intolerable. From there it was back to England, then Australia and finally  to America in 1979, to Buffalo where Frank earned his doctorate. Later they moved to Colorado, where he was Professor of Library Studies at the University of Northern Colorado until retiring in 1997. Frank published James A. Michener: A Checklist of his Work with a Selected Annotated Bibliography (Greenwood Press) in 1995. He has written on bookmarks, specifically on medieval bookmarks, his special area of interest. A poet by avocation, he writes eclectically but traditionally. He can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it