When you have as many old books as I do, or if you rummage among as many old bookshops as I do, you inevitably find many things pressed between pages. Usually you find items that people have used as makeshift bookmarks, but sometimes you discover things that people just wanted pressed flat. Occasionally you might happen on something that somebody probably wanted hidden.
One way or another I’ve ended up with a couple of albums full of interesting bits and pieces of ephemera that have fallen out of old books. Some I’ve chosen to leave with the books I found them in, because they seemed so at home there. Others I’ve pulled aside, often because the bits and pieces are more interesting than the books, which perhaps I haven’t chosen to keep.
A year or so ago I met a man after my own heart, running the second-hand bookshop in Bellingen, NSW. This gentleman had a box full of makeshift bookmarks he’d salvaged over a number of years, and he gladly let me poke around and pick some gems for my collection.
I love these little odds and ends for their quirky value as fragments of other people’s lives and of social history, if you like.
Here are some of my favourites.
These beautiful inscribed gum leaves were pressed in heavy bank journals. They are delightfully poignant, but also very fragile.
This vintage chocolate wrapper was an obvious makeshift bookmark.
Here’s a bookmark that has covered some miles, courtesy of my Bellingen friend.
An art union ticket from the Great Depression era: obviously not a winner, but a shilling well-invested anyway.
A Melbourne tram ticket.
And a more recent ticket, this time to a Skyhooks concert. That was living in the 70s.
Sometimes you even find bookmarks in books. This one was made to advertise a Newcastle business.
Butterflies don’t seem to last well in books.
Back in the days when childhood obesity wasn’t really a thing.
Dr Ferguson, of Mayfield, certainly wrote like a doctor.
A petrol ration ticket: a reminder of the war years.
This well-thumbed erotic poem, written in pencil, was found while browsing in a book at Rozelle Markets, in Sydney. Leslie, from AB Books at Croydon, used to sell books there every weekend. When I found this gem I could see it was incomplete and Leslie undertook to search for the missing page. She was as good as her word and, a week or two later, the extra page arrived in the mail. I’m not showing it all here, because it’s rather explicit. I wonder if it really was written, as purports to be the case, by a lady for the edification of her friend Marjorie?
A ship, hand-painted on a leaf-shaped scrap of silk. Very pretty.
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