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Bookmarks

Posted on 07/01/2010 by admin

We make them out of almost anything in this family. Anything that has some colour and if it doesn’t have colour then out come the colour pencils. I am not sure if it classes as a tradition but almost every book of the thousands here has their own.

Some are charity thin cardboard paintings sent as bookmarks with requests for funds, others are old Christmas paper, dried flowers that puff the page up rather than poke out of the top…or bottom if you put it away and it was too dark to see what you were doing anyway and why were you reading in hardly any light? Cartoons cut from newspapers, envelopes decorated with my mother’s idea of trees and flowers, card cut into shapes, precious material from some garment worn by someone, somewhere, sometime.

And all of them, of course, are left in the books at random pages for the next person to come along and wonder what on Earth this bookmark is meant to look like and when it was made and who made it…all of which has to be known before one starts reading.

But that I suppose is the aim, for everything in an Artist’s life is more than itself and bookmarks don’t only mark pages but life…and how one was feeling the first time this book was found or read and what materials were around one could afford to use as a bookmark. And the books themselves are bookmarks of particular days, arranged on shelves in no particular order all ready to be leafed through and play out their acts in the endless interplay of the theatre of lives.

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Children’s author, novelist, editor and poet.

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