Ó hAoḋa

How I Use Bookmarks (the Physical Kind)

Introduction§

When I created this blog, its purpose was primarily to give me a place to put my thoughts on issues that mattered to me but that were mind-numbingly boring to any other reasonable person, and in keeping with that original spirit, I want to talk today about how I use bookmarks (that is, the physical kind you put in books). I want to make it clear that I make no pretence of being unaware of just how boring, irrelevant, and inconsequential any reasonable person would find the following — so all hope abandon, ye who enter here¹. I have very particular views on what makes a good bookmark and how to use them, which can be primarily broken down into the following two headings:

Double-Orientability§

The naïve approach to bookmarking with which we’re all familiar is just to put any piece of paper on the page of the book to which we want to return; however, this approach is greatly limiting, as it narrows down the place where you left off in the book to two pages (a spread in bookbinding terms) — helpful, sure, but you still have to search through the pages for where you left off unless you left off somewhere obvious, like the start of a new chapter.

Some bookmarks I would describe as orientable and others as non-orientable: what I mean by this is some bookmarks have a distinct front and back, whereas others have identical sides — the former I describe as orientable and the latter as non-orientable. If your bookmark is orientable, it allows you to narrow down your place in the book to a single page, thus increasing the accuracy of your bookmark by 50%; this can be achieved by always placing a particular side of your bookmark (say, the side you identify as the “back”) touching the page on which you left off.

Indeed, some bookmarks have not only an identifiable front and back, but a top and bottom as well: these I describe as doubly-orientable, as they have two dimensions in which they can be oriented. Thus, a doubly-orientable bookmark can not just pinpoint your location in the text to a spread (the two facing pages identified by a non-orientable bookmark) or to an individual page (identified by an orientable bookmark), but to the top or bottom half of a particular page. Thus, when you return to your book to pick up where you left off, you have to spend next to no time looking for your place, as there are usually only 1–3 paragraph starts within a single half-page area (or spread-quadrant) at which you could reasonably have left off.

Double-Bookmarking§

Often, texts that have a great deal of footnotes (or endnotes rather) place these notes in one place at the end of the text rather than at the bottom of the page; I tend to dislike this approach, as although it allows for a neater page and a cleaner reading experience without interruption by footnotes, it makes it more difficult to read the notes and to keep track of them. In my view, if the publisher thought the endnote was worth the trouble of putting in the book, it’s worth reading, and since I’ll be reading it either way, I would prefer it to be in the most convenient location, i.e., the page where it’s relevant. My view is that footnotes should be used for essential or near-essential notes on the text (explanations, corrections, caveats, etc.) and that endnotes should be used for incidental, non-essential further notes on the text (references, citations, etc.) that you don’t expect the reader to read the entirety of.

Anyway, this is a long-winded lead-in to my suggestion that, in the situation that some accursèd publisher has done you the disservice of placing all the notes of the text in a single endnotes section, you can make use of two bookmarks to keep track of your progress through both the main body of text and through the notes; otherwise, you spend an inordinate amount of time flipping to the back of the book and searching for the note’s number, only to repeat the search again in a few line’s time. You can further cut down on the time needed to find where you left off by using the double-orientability of your bookmark to narrow down the location of the footnote for which you’re searching to a quarter-page area.