dumbfoundry

Of all the types of book-mad runoff, the bookmark has the greatest capacity for unintended frisson, offering up not just an act of reading, but beautiful clues as to how that reading, the book itself, intersected with the verities of modern existence in the outside world. Books themselves are more valuable with the lingering love of past readers scarring their pages; given the choice of a new edition of, say, Manhattan Transfer or that 1925 copy, barnacled with eighty years of readerly experience, how could you opt for the new? Who were these readers of my used books, and why did they stop where they did? There’s something Walter Benjamin–ish about a bookmark’s serendipitous, colliding vectors of significance: making real a book’s fourth-dimensional life, sanctifying it as a historical integer that has been held, owned, used, like a tool, and passed on, not merely written, published, and sold.

This entry was posted by Ivy on Tuesday, November 08, 2005 at 7:21 PM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.