Let’s go out for the day – I wonder what’s on this weekend? A quick scan of The Independent’s weekly listings comes up with Roger Bacon at the Tate Modern or Isamu Noguchi at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. What about Arlo Guthrie on tour, or Julius Caesar at the Tobacco Factory? Maybe something completely different – Blackburn Rovers versus Hull City, or An Evening with Joan Bakewell? What’s this – The Dave Mitchell Bookmark Collection? No, I think we’ll give that a miss.
Actually, it’s a fantasy that the Independent would even list my worthy exhibition. Having a collection of bookmarks must be a specific diagnostic test for nerds. I am indeed wearing an anorak even as I type this out. Within the anorak is a hairy sweater, on my chin is a less hairy beard and on the table lie my short-sight spectacles – and I used to be a Morris Dancer. In the old Eagle Comic days (yes, my age is uncool too) I would have been an applicant (failed) for the role of Giglamps, the weedy bespectacled swat of the fourth form. I remember that in comic strip adventures the resource and intelligence of Giglamps would turn out to be vital at a crucial moment, and indeed it is people like me, or as I try to be, that RUN THE WORLD! You un-nerds are all in our power. BEHAVE, or we’ll stop ordering books and let the lights go out! Alas, not much worldly status or wealth comes with the power to keep the Power on; maybe we’ll get our revenge by wiping your hard-drives…but the main thing is that some women really do go for us, despite the contrary myth.
Stop rambling – the Bookmarks! I’ve been buying and selling second-hand books for 35 years “How long?” 35 YEARS. Between the buying and the selling I do usually open the books to make sure there are words inside (describing the bookseller’s quick appraisal-scan technique would make another article), and sometimes there is a bookmark inside as well – if it’s doing its job, then that is where the book will open. I promptly take the bookmark out and KEEP IT! Why?, or perhaps Why not? The deep motivation is probably an adaptation selected by evolution, the desire to combat the general increase of entropy, as evidenced by stamp-collecting and the general desire not to throw anything away – Collecting as a thermodynamic strategy. Nearer the surface, I think I am fascinated by the window bookmarks afford on cultural history, on styles of commercial art, on fashions, on social movements. Should nothing else from our civilisation survive, you could reconstruct our entire way of life from them – maybe.
Now I’ve confessed. Maybe you will never grace these (many) steps again, preferring to frequent the (lesser) establishments of those more sporting booksellers who leave the bookmarks in. I have already been punished once for my cupidity, when I missed one of the most beautiful bookmarks I have ever seen, Victorian and in the shape of a champagne bottle, which a regular customer triumphantly showed me AFTER he had bought the book it was in, as if it wasn’t enough to be escaping with all our most precious volumes.
How many bookmarks have I accumulated? Ivan, our book-pricer, and I seem to fill a pocket file every few months, and after a year’s overfilling they get too thick for the filing cabinet and have to be stored somewhere else. I keep finding nests of these bulging files in odd corners of the house and shop, with labels like Bookmarks IV, 1983-85. Supposing I put aside only one bookmark a day (and we have a throughput of more like a hundred second-hand books a day) then that’s some 350 a year. Multiply by the aforesaid 35 years, or 49 times 25 times 10 if you are a mental arithmagician – and you come out with about 12,000. Is that a lot?? End to end they wouldn’t even stretch for a mile, let alone “to the moon and back”. Certainly no gull-infested EC Bookmark Mountain. At ten to the square foot, I could exhibit them on twelve hundred square feet of wall space; say 150 feet of eight-foot high wall, or around the walls of a single 50 foot by 25 foot room in a museum or art gallery. The Dave Mitchell Bookmarks Room. We could even do it in the shop – if I first got rid of the books. I can’t, so has any kindly curator out there a spare room in an art gallery? It would make a change from all that white space with a video, an arbitrary installation and a bored curator in the middle, like they do at the Arnolfini. Contemporary Art galleries do seem to follow in the tradition of Thorstein Veblen’s concept of Conspicuous Consumption – “Look how much expensive city-centre space we can afford to do nothing with.” Why not waste the space another way – by letting the Dave Mitchell Collection of Bookmarks see the toplight of day. The only expense would be blu-tack. Actually, no – displaying them without damage is a challenge, even if you are content to see just one side. It might be necessary to cut 12,000 holes of just the right sizes in several reams of card sheets.
If I can’t exhibit them, then what? Maybe I could get a Ph.D. bursary to study them. I already have a Ph.D. – are you allowed two? It would be nice to be a “Dr. Dr.”, I think they have them in Germany. Some Aspects of the Unwitting Testimony of the Bookmark? Certainly bookmarks do constitute a witness to social life and its changing emphases. Lots of flourishing private and public organisations seem to think that they just haven’t made it if they are not, in addition to the TV programmes and the Books-of-the-Series, up there in bookmarks alongside the libraries, the margarine adverts and the anti-litter campaigns. I suppose that bookmarks can be viewed as moles, or sleepers or fifth-columnists, going to ground between the pages of quite unrelated and innocent books, ready to leap out and influence the unsuspecting reader at any time for centuries to come, books being a long-lived species (see our article on The Ecology of Books). Maybe the whole point of bookmarks is that there is no need to go to an exhibition; they are out there waiting to assail your eyes whether you like it or not, telling you to wash your hands, visit the citizens’ advice bureau or insure your life. Bookmarks – benign influence or virulent influenza? Yes, there’s definitely scope for a grant-application somewhere here, but I need classical scientific or medical terms for bookmark and bookmark-collection – any suggestions? Compilatus Libersignorum?
If all else fails, I suppose I could start slipping the old bookmarks back into new books – we have some 40,000 new volumes in stock, we could put a historic bookmark in nearly every one of them. Could be a good marketing stunt!
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