Since this past weekend was the annual Friends of the Guelph Public Library Book Sale I thought I’d post a pic of this year’s bookmark, and one from way back in 2017. A long time ago! At some point I guess they got demoted from a Giant Book Sale to a Big Book Sale. I don’t know why. This year it was held at a bigger location.
Book: Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction by Alec Nevala-Lee
Is this a goose, or a swan? I can tell the difference in the wild (swans are huge), but not from this sturdy brass bookmark.
Book: Savage Peace: Hope and Fear in America, 1919 by Ann Hagedorn
There are several bookstores named Booksmith that are still going. I think the most famous one may be in San Francisco. But I picked up these bookmarks on my one and only trip to New Hampshire in 1996, and I don’t think this particular Booksmith, which had three locations at the time, is still in existence. At least that’s what I’m given to understand by my sources on the ground in the Granite State. Which leads me to believe that this particular Booksmith is a Bookstore No More.
Book: Number Go Up: Inside Crypto’s Wild Rise and Staggering Fall by Zeke Faux
This bookmark isn’t in the best of shape, but like a lot of these Bookstores No More bookmarks it represents a bit of history. Macondo is of course the fictional town that provides the setting for Gabriel García Márquez’s novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, but it’s also the name of a second-hand bookstore that was located just across the street from City Hall in Guelph for 36 years. “Established 1978 — Open 7 Days a Week.” It closed doors in 2014 for all the usual reasons. As the owner put it, “It’s a business that is no longer sustainable. It has been a great business over the last 36 years, but it has slowly fallen off. And we recognize that it is a big cultural shift that’s not going to change, or change in time to help us.”
Book: Why Liberalism Failed by Patrick Deneen
Mont-Tremblant is best known for its ski resort, but you can also pick up bookmarks there. I don’t ski.
Book: The Origin of Species by Nino Ricci
Hand carved from Quebec. Kind of bulky for use (it’s actually quite thick), but I like the concept.
Book: Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
These are oversize examples of paperclip bookmarks, which tends to be a cutesy-novelty style. I’ve never actually used a regular office paperclip as a bookmark but I’ve seen people who have. I guess they’re fit for purpose, but they’re not easy on the pages.
Book: The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow
Original Murano glass on sterling silver, from Venice. The inset is just glued on and I had to re-glue it at some point. Still very pretty.
Book: Henry Vaughn: The Complete Poems edited by Alan Rudrum
This is a bit of a fudge for my Bookstores No More series, since there are still four Book City locations open in Toronto. But this bookmark came from the original Book City store, which opened in 1976 in Toronto’s Annex neighbourhood. It’s the one I went to when I lived just down the road a bit. It was Book City’s flagship store, but closed doors in 2014. Fondly remembered!
Book: Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou
In most if not all of my Bookstores No More posts I’ve been showcasing bookmarks from stores that closed down in the face of competition first from big box stores and then from online retailers. Book Depository is a bit of an exception in that it began as an online bookseller, based in the UK, in 2004. Over the years I ordered quite a few titles from them, and when the books came they usually included a Book Depository bookmark.
Little did I know that these bookmarks would soon be part of the Bookstores No More collection. Book Depository was bought out by Amazon in 2011 and a dozen years later, in 2023, Amazon closed it down. I guess it just didn’t make any sense having two sites offering what was basically the same service. In any event, here are some bookmarks to let you take a trip down a (recent) memory lane.
Book: The Riverside Chaucer edited by Larry Dean Benson and F. N. Robinson
Alex Good 