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
bookmarks
Bookmarked! #51: Bookstores No More VII: Book City (Annex Location)
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
Bookmarked! #50: Bookstores No More VI: Book Depository
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
Bookmarked! #49: Kitty Corner
This is a particular kind of bookmark where the page slips into a cloth pocket. They go by different names, but this one, by Dane Jane Designs of Cambridge, is called a corner bookmark. I thought it made sense to pair it with “cat” in the OED, which made for an awkward entry at the top of the page. Oh well.
Book: The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary
Bookmarked! #48: Bon Voyage!
I’ve never been on a cruise. But I know people who have. I guess some cruise ships have small onboard libraries, even though print is about as dated now as the age of sail.
Anyway, if you took a book out of this ship’s library they gave you a bookmark as a reminder to bring it back. As if that $25 deposit wasn’t enough of an incentive. That seems pricey to me.
Book: Angel of Vengeance: The “Girl Assassin,” the Governor of St. Petersburg, and Russia’s Revolutionary World by Ana Siljak
Bookmarked! #47: Dare to Dream
On the flip side of the pendant it says “Rêve.” Because Canada is bilingual.
Book: The Broken Ladder: How Inequality Affects the Way We Think, Live, and Die by Keith Payne
Bookmarked! #46: Another Bookworm
I’ve posted a bookworm bookmark before. This one’s pewter I think. It’s a fun motif for a bookmark.
Book: Haywire: A Political History of Britain since 2000 by Andrew Hindmoor
Bookmarked! #45: Summer Palace
Off to China again for a set of delicate bookmarks from the Summer Palace. I’ve never been to China, but I know a lot of people who are either from there or have visited. And they bring me back bookmarks! See here for some nice ones from the Beijing Opera.
Book: China After Mao: The Rise of a Superpower by Frank Dikötter
Bookmarked! #44: Bookstores No More V: Lichtman’s News and Books
I think I only visited Lichtman’s a half dozen times when I was living in Toronto. Back then they were actually Canada’s biggest chain of independent book stores. Their first store opened in 1909 in Toronto, and they filed for bankruptcy in 2000 for all the usual reasons (competition from the big box stores and online retailers).
Book: Cinema Speculation by Quentin Tarantino
Bookmarked! #43: Bookstores No More IV: The Book Room
I’ve only visited Halifax once, around 2002 I believe, which is when I picked up my Citadel bookmark. I also visited The Book Room, which at the time was Canada’s oldest bookstore and (per Wikipedia) the largest non-chain bookstore in Eastern Canada. Some of its history is provided on the back of this bookmark. It closed in 2008 at the ripe old age of 169, a victim of people starting to buying books online and the practice of dual pricing (a recurring problem when currencies fluctuate and books become a lot more expensive in Canada than the U.S.).
With regard to people making their purchases online, the CBC story on the closing of The Book Room included this depressing little anecdote:
“The market reality is really changing,” said owner Charles Burchell, who described how a book was delivered to his store by mistake around Christmas time. The Book Room sits on the bottom of an apartment building; an online order was made by a tenant upstairs.
“The book was on our shelf, so they could have come down in two minutes and picked the book up, but they chose to order by computer and wait five [to] seven days for it to come in,” Burchell told CBC Radio.
That’s grim, and the sort of shift that a lot of retailers, not just of books, were having to deal with around the same time.
Book: The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism by Tim Alberta
Alex Good 