I had an earlier Bookmarked! post featuring some of the library card art of Darryl Berger (“making art from obscure objects”). These three bookmarks are another set, being three different portraits of Napoleon painted on library cards of books about Napoleon. Love the concept and the execution. Great stuff!
Book: Napoleon: A Life by Adam Zamoyski
I haven’t read the book this bookmark is advertising, though it sounds like it might be interesting. The editor was actually a neighbour of mine for a few years.
Book: Medieval Europe by Chris Wickham
I think this may be the oak leaf cluster design, which is a military decoration. It has the three acorns. But then again it might be something else. I don’t remember where I got it. It looks nice.
Book: Another America: The Story of Liberia and the Former Slaves Who Ruled It by James Ciment
An interesting, not to mention risky, business idea: Longhouse Books was launched in 1972 as a bookstore that only sold Canadian titles. These were the heady days of peak Canadian cultural nationalism though and it did well for a while. The original owners sold it in 1989, and after relocating to the Bloor Street address you see printed on this bookmark it closed six years later. I lived on Bloor West for a while in the early ’90s but don’t remember ever visiting, though I must have dropped in at some point.
Book: Evelyn Waugh: A Life Revisited by Philip Eade
This store wasn’t actually located in a cellar. I think they just liked the pun. It operated at street level, across from the fashionable Four Seasons Hotel in Yorkville (as the bookmark here proudly points out). Perhaps because of its convenient location it was apparently known as the book store to the stars because people like Elizabeth Taylor, Mick Jagger, and Madonna were seen shopping there. I believe it closed its doors in 1997.
Book: The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (ed. Alex Preminger and T. V. F. Brogan
The Writers’ Trust has a bunch of literary prizes that they give out in different categories. The names sometimes change for branding purposes, but here’s a selection I’ve picked up celebrating the winners from previous years. From left to right: 2015 Vicky Metcalf Award for Literature for Young People, 2015 Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction, 2007 Rogers Writers’ Trust Prize for Fiction, 2015 Rogers Writers’ Trust Prize for Fiction, and the 2017 for Vicky Metcalf Award for Literature for Young People
Book: The Annotated Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (ed. William S. Baring-Gould)
A leaf bookmark. But I don’t know what kind of leaf. I believe the morphology is known as “falcate.” I asked the person who gave it to me what it was and she said she didn’t know, she picked it up at an estate sale. So there you have it: a botanical-bookmark mystery!
Book: Poor Things by Alasdair Gray
The last couple of posts have been of bookmarks that my friends brought me back from China. This is the third and final one, and is of blue-and-white pottery on a blade-style bookmark.
But it also comes with a special engraving: 郝好. This is pronounced “Hao Hao” (or something like that), and a few years back we came up with it as my “Chinese name.” The first character is a surname. The second basically means “good,” as in the greeting 你好 (ni hao: hello). I don’t think there are many people with the name Hao Hao, but it’s kind of fun. And a great bookmark!
Book: China After Mao: The Rise of a Superpower by Frank Dikötter
I know I had a panda bookmark a little while ago, but this is one that my friends just brought me back from China and I wanted to post it right away. It has a ruler on one side because you never know when you might want to underline something. Not that I would ever do that. The little pendant is bamboo so that the panda will have something to eat. Or at least that’s what I was told.
Book: Confucius and the World He Created by Michael Schuman
This is not a pipe. It’s a pipa (琵琶) or Chinese lute. But actually it’s not a pipa either. It’s a bookmark in the shape of a pipa. Some friends just returned from a visit to China and they brought me back a bunch of bookmarks. More coming soon!
Book: Restless Empire: China and the World Since 1750 by Odd Arne Westad
Alex Good 