I once read a book by a book curator who decried the use of bookmarks as the cheap paper stained the interior of the book paper. She stated that if you can’t remember your place you deserved to start at the beginning. I typically read six books at a time, and once read as many as thirty at a time, and am heavily reliant on bookmarks. Let me explain how I came to appreciate their true value.
I always hated getting a used book and finding someone else’s lines and highlighting shading it. It occurs to me now that I may have written this article before—oh well, good luck finding it. But, if you want to talk about a pain in the ass, try reading my notes—this hand has been broken seven times. Besides, that generates another document, an intermediary document between my source material and what I am writing. This is particularly cumbersome when doing book reviews.
How to put the bookmark to work taking notes?
I use business cards.
When I find a passage of note I—if I own the book—mark a bracket in the right margin, and then mark that page number on the business card, which can hold dozens of such notations. If I don’t own the book, I mark down the paragraph and line on the bookmark.
Where densely informative nonfiction books are concerned, I employ a supplementary method. I take my lunch receipts and ATM receipts and use them for my comments, and, in the case of a borrowed or library book, to copy quotes for my review. With very detailed and anecdotally rich works like War Before Civilization or Storm of Steel I might end up with as many as 10 receipts stabled together into a ghetto-worthy notebook/bookmark.
With my own books I keep the card in the volume as an index to help inquiries down the road. I have learned to my chagrin that once I use a book for researching one project, I tend to require it for another that I had not previously envisioned writing.
And finally, the book review itself is retained—indeed these were originally envisioned as such—as a record of my impression of the work for my later reference.
