My Top Five Bookmarks

Weekly Geeks prompt this week asks us to discuss 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?


I would love to come in here and say that I use these wonderfully creative, beautiful bookmarks, but unfortunately I don't. I own a few, but they are more often used as decoration on my bookshelf. No, I use what's handy, anything laying around, to mark my spot in a book. So here are my top five most often used bookmarks.



#5: An Actual Bookmark (2%)
Never the pretty kind with quotes and colors and fringes - those sit on my bookshelves - but I will every now and then use one of my plain paper bookmarks that come to me from LibraryThing or departments at my college. This is a very very rare occurrence.

#4: Memorizing the Page Number (3%)
Sometimes I just remember what page I'm on: look at the page number, close the book, and move on. I tend to do this when I know I'll be reading the book later that day or the next. No longer than that though or I'll forget the number.

#3: A Coffee Cup (5%)
Because I have reading marathons, going for hours at a time, most of the time I have to mark a page, I'll only be gone for a few minutes. For these short times away, I lay the book down on my coffee table, set a coffee cup, a glass, a can of coke, whatever, on the thicker portion of the book. This way the book doesn't close.

#2: Scraps of Paper (15%)
Very commonly I just stick in whatever thin item, typically paper, is laying around at the time. To Do lists, grocery lists, receipts, corner pieces of notebook paper, photographs, these all find their way into my books quite often. Sometimes the paper stays in after I'm done and months or years later, when I re-read the book, I'll find a note or receipt. It's geeky but fun.

#1: The Book Itself (75%)
There are two ways I use the book itself. One, I lay the open book face down on my couch or coffee table. The book never closes and I know where to start reading again. The most common way I mark a page, however, is to literally mark the page, folding over the corner, dog-earring the book. Some dislike both these methods as one puts creases in the spine and the other creases on the pages. Pppfffttt to you. I love books. I love to read them, look at them, touch them, smell them, organize them, talk about them, and loan them out. But they are meant to be used. A book with no creases, no greasy fingerprint marks, no slightly blurred words from a drop of condensation off a glass, in other words a perfectly preserved book...that's just sad, pitiful. So I'm perfectly fine with this method.

So what do you use?