No, I never scratched any of these. Even if I did wonder what Punk Berry Penguin was like. According to the promo material (printed on the back) they are “KAPOW! (Kid Activated Power Scents!) Super Fun Scented Bookmarks Activated by Scratch Action!” I’d be concerned that some of that smell might come off on the book I was reading!
Book: A Natural History of Human Emotions by Stuart Walton
Got this from some friends who went to California a couple of years ago. It’s another 3-D bookmark, this time of poppies along the coast. Very seasonal, and having a bookmark is the next best thing to being there!
Book: The Haves and Have-Yachts: Dispatches on the Ultrarich by Evan Osnos
Every now and then I leave a bookmark in its packaging. This is a good example. I think Lulu would look a bit naked, and a lot skinnier without it.
Not sure who I know brought me this back from Africa. But it’s part of my “Around the World” display now.
Book: Goliath’s Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse by Luke Kemp
We’ve had our April showers, now it’s flower season! Time to celebrate spring with this handcrafted felt bookmark which I can tell you is just soft and cushy as it seems.
Book: Bots and Beasts: What Makes Machines, Animals, and People Smart? by Paul Thagard
If Miss Piggy says you should read then I guess you should. Otherwise she’ll karate chop you. I seem to remember that’s how she dealt with people.
Book: A History of Reading by Alberto Manguel
Well, they were real people. But that was a couple of thousand years ago.
Mummies of the World was a traveling exhibition that I might have gone to see, but now I have no memory of it. I did keep the bookmark though!
Book: Tutankhamun and the Tomb that Changed the World by Bob Brier
Apparently there are a lot of mystery bookstores all over the world called As the Plot Thickens. This one was in Kingston and I do remember being in it in the 1990s. I don’t know when it closed.
Book: The Big Book of Sherlock Holmes Stories ed. by Otto Penzler
Ramona knows! Of course, sometimes the buildings aren’t forever, as a previous post showed. But the idea of the library keeps going.
Another little bookmark I picked up, almost certainly at a library, in the 1980s. No DVDs to borrow back then. You signed out films by the reel!
Book: The Castle by Franz Kafka
Take a book to bed instead . . . of what? A bottle? A blonde?
I don’t know when I picked these up, but it says they were printed in the mid-1980s which sounds about right. Bookstores and libraries used to always have stacks of free bookmarks like these at the checkout but now you rarely see them.
Book: Written in Water: The Ephemeral Life of the Classic in Art by Rochelle Gurstein
These are four bookmarks from a set of 30. There are a lot of sets sold like this and if you like the particular theme (I have sets of old maps and paintings by Van Gogh) I think they’re pretty nice.
Book: Wealth and Power: China’s Long March to the Twenty-First Century by Orville Schell and John Delury
Alex Good 