Death of a reading accessory
Look – there it lies, my lovely Pakistani embroidered bookmark. To see it with its end all curled up like that, it looks as if it has just crawled away into a corner to die, like a beautiful doe seeking out a quiet corner of the forest for her end.
The thing is, ever since I bought an e-reader five months ago, I haven’t used it. I found it this morning, discarded under a pile of paperwork. These days I don’t need bookmarks of any kind, because my clever little gadget remembers where I was when I virtually closed the the digital book.
What will happen to all the bookmarks, I wonder? My brother used to collect shiny leather ones from all sorts of holiday destinations – their bright gold pictures of wells and vintage cars printed on the leather. What will our children’s children think of them? Will they become accoutrements of a bewilderingly bygone age, like starting handles for a vintage car? Perhaps we should all use them to fill the gaps left on shelves vacated by hardbacks which have departed for pixel-land.
If anybody has come across an artist doing something creative with these gems, I would love to know about it.
