Last month, in the car park after a beaver-watching evening on the River Tay, we were all given bookmarks advertising the local wildlife trust. The bookmark format was perfect for the long, sleek form of the animals, a metre from nose to the tail, or scoop. But the memento also struck an oddly nostalgic note. What ever happened to bookmarks? Thick leather ones with gilt printing at pocket-money prices were the stuff of museum gift shops when I was a child, but they seem now almost extinct. 

Douglas Adams memorably proposed that the reason you could never lay hands on a pen was because they slipped through cosmic wormholes to find biro-bliss on their own planet. An adjacent star must be rehoming the scores of bookmarks I’ve acquired and lost during my life. Now, when I want to mark a page in an ordinary paperback, I’m ashamed to admit that I fold down the page corner. If the book under consideration deserves milder handling, I use whatever is nearby: a birthday card, a ticket or, in extremis, a torn strip of printed paper. I’m reminded of Flann O’Brien’s parodic professional ‘book-handling’ service, floated in the Irish Times. Depending on the level of subscription, the book-handling service would insert casually impressive bookmarks and other memorabilia, including high-end French-language ephemera, theatrical souvenirs or handwritten letters. Occasionally, a library reveals the discovery of some unlikely object nestled in the pages of a book: a bacon rasher, a lock of hair or, in the case of some Cambridge University librarians and a 16th-century copy of St Augustine’s complete works, the desiccated remains of a fruit bun. 

One of the technological advantages of early books – the form known as the codex – over the scroll was the possibility of marking a place, or several places, among its pages. Codices enabled and encouraged flipping back and forward between different sections. Some historians of the book argue that