Book History & Reading Culture
The History of Bookmarks: We’ve Been Trying Not to Lose Our Place for Centuries
From ingenious medieval page markers to woven silk keepsakes and the receipts, tickets and notes we still tuck inside books, readers have been finding ways to remember their place for centuries.
You stop reading halfway through chapter twelve.
Your proper bookmark is nowhere to be found, obviously.
So you reach for whatever is nearby.
A receipt. A train ticket. An old postcard. The corner of an envelope. A scrap of paper containing a note that made perfect sense three months ago and is now completely indecipherable.
Into the book it goes.
Problem solved.
It is such an ordinary little ritual that we barely think about it. But readers have been solving versions of this same problem for centuries.
Books have been copied by hand, printed on presses, sold in railway stations, mass-produced as paperbacks and downloaded onto screens.
Yet the reader still has one extremely practical question:
The history of bookmarks is really the history of our attempts to answer it.
And somewhere along the way, the objects we put between pages started recording more than page numbers.
When Were Bookmarks Invented?
There is no securely documented moment when somebody “invented the bookmark.”
That is partly because the definition gets complicated surprisingly quickly.
If by bookmark we mean any purpose-made object that helps a reader return to a particular place in a bound text, forms of page-marking existed in the manuscript era, centuries before modern printed bookmarks.
Medieval manuscripts preserve evidence of sophisticated markers sometimes described by scholars and libraries as register bookmarks or rotating bookmarks. These could use a cord or strip attached to the book with a movable component designed to identify a particular place in the text.
Other manuscripts and bindings incorporated cords, tabs and related finding devices.
That answer is slightly less satisfying than discovering that Bartholomew Bookmark woke up one Tuesday in 1263 and changed reading forever.
History frequently refuses to cooperate with good branding.
How Did Early Readers Mark Their Place?
Before looking at medieval page markers, it helps to remember that the books themselves were different objects.
A medieval manuscript might be expensive and laborious to produce. It could be used for study, worship, administration or reference, so finding your way around one could involve much more than remembering where you stopped reading before bed.
Readers and book users developed a range of navigational tools.
Surviving manuscripts show evidence of tabs and other finding aids used to locate important sections. Some medieval bookmarks were considerably more ingenious than the loose rectangle of card we recognise today.
One particularly interesting form is the rotating bookmark.
Examples documented in manuscript collections use a cord or strip combined with a movable element. Depending on the construction of the surviving device, this could help indicate a position down the page and distinguish between columns.
In other words, some medieval readers were not merely marking the page.
They were marking where on the page.
That makes sense when you consider manuscripts containing text arranged in multiple columns or books being repeatedly consulted for study and reference.
The marker was part memory aid, part navigation system.
The surviving evidence also gives us a useful warning about bookmark history: not every historical page marker looked like a modern bookmark, and not every device had exactly the same purpose.
Terms such as bookmark, register, tab and page marker can overlap when modern institutions describe historical objects. That is one reason claims about a single “earliest bookmark” should be treated cautiously.
Once people had books with pages, they found ways to find their way back.
How the Bookmark Changed Alongside the Book
The bookmark did not evolve on its own.
It followed the book.
The spread of printing in Europe from the fifteenth century transformed book production. Over the centuries that followed, books were produced in greater numbers and eventually became accessible to much broader reading publics.
The culture surrounding reading changed with them.
Books increasingly became personal possessions for a widening range of readers. Publishing expanded into a major industry, and the nineteenth century brought enormous developments in printing, paper production and the commercial book trade.
Page markers became part of this expanding material world of reading.
Bound books could incorporate ribbon markers, a solution that remains familiar today. Loose markers could be made from paper, card, textile and other materials.
And by the nineteenth century, bookmarks could also be objects worth looking at in their own right.
A Very Short History of Keeping Your Place
- Medieval manuscript culture Tabs, cords and sophisticated finding devices helped readers navigate handwritten books.
- The age of print As printed books became more numerous, the culture and practical objects surrounding reading expanded too.
- Ribbon markers Markers incorporated into book bindings offered a simple solution that remains in use today.
- Nineteenth-century decorative bookmarks Woven and printed bookmarks could become gifts, keepsakes, advertisements and collectibles.
- The modern reader Beautiful bookmark purchased especially for reading. Missing. Receipt from supermarket? Perfect.
When the Bookmark Became Something to Keep
Coventry manufacturer Thomas Stevens became famous in the nineteenth century for producing colourful woven silk pictures and keepsakes using mechanised ribbon-weaving techniques.
Today these objects are commonly known as Stevengraphs.
Surviving museum examples include woven silk bookmarks carrying decorative pictures, greetings, commemorative subjects and other designs.
Suddenly, an object whose entire job was essentially remember this page could also be something beautiful enough to give, collect or keep.
Which, when you think about it, was probably inevitable.
Give readers a practical object and sooner or later somebody will make a beautiful version of it.
When Bookmarks Became More Than Practical
A strip of paper can remember page 184 perfectly well.
So why decorate it?
Because humans are spectacularly incapable of leaving useful objects merely useful.
Bookmarks have carried pictures, advertising, religious messages, calendars, commemorative designs, greetings and quotations. They have been produced as souvenirs and keepsakes and made from everything from woven silk and printed card to leather and metal.
The development of inexpensive commercial printing also made the bookmark particularly suited to promotion.
It occupies valuable territory, after all.
A bookmark sits inside something its owner has deliberately chosen to spend hours with. It gets handled repeatedly. It may survive long after the advertisement, shop or event that produced it has disappeared.
Libraries, publishers, booksellers, organisations and businesses have all made use of that peculiar staying power.
But some of the most interesting bookmarks were never manufactured as bookmarks at all.
They are simply the things readers put there.
The Strange Things We Leave Between Pages
Open enough second-hand books and eventually the books start giving things back.
Bits of correspondence that somebody presumably meant to retrieve and then did not.
Libraries and archives know this phenomenon well.
Items found inside books can create conservation problems, particularly when their materials stain, distort, abrade or otherwise damage the pages.
But inserted material can also contribute evidence about the history of a particular copy and the people who owned or used it.
Book historians have an important concept here: provenance.
A book is not only a container for the text printed inside it. An individual copy can accumulate evidence of its own history through inscriptions, annotations, bookplates, inserted material and other traces left by its owners and readers.
Not every abandoned supermarket receipt is historically significant, obviously.
Sometimes a receipt is just what happened to be within grabbing distance when somebody became sleepy on page 73.
But time has a funny effect on ordinary objects.
Imagine finding a train ticket in a book you last read fifteen years ago.
The ticket still marks the page.
But now it marks a journey too.
A restaurant receipt might recall the city where you bought the book.
A postcard might bring back the person who sent it.
A pressed flower may have a story attached to it, or none you can remember.
A shopping list can suddenly become an oddly intimate record of an ordinary Tuesday.
These objects were rarely intended to become archives.
That is precisely what makes them interesting.
They are accidental records of reading happening alongside life.
The Improvised Bookmark Is Practically a Reader Tradition
There is also something pleasingly democratic about the improvised bookmark.
The history of books contains astonishing craftsmanship: illuminated manuscripts, elaborate bindings, fine papers, woven silks and beautifully designed printed ephemera.
And yet faced with the immediate need to preserve page 247, the modern reader may calmly insert a gas bill.
Efficiency wins.
Ask a group of readers what they have used as a bookmark and the answers can become an inventory of whatever happened to exist within arm's reach.
Receipts and tickets are obvious candidates. So are envelopes, sticky notes, photographs and scraps of packaging.
Some choices are considerably better for the book than others. Conservators have good reason to be wary of objects that can stain, distort, abrade or otherwise damage pages.
So perhaps do not interpret this as an official endorsement of putting absolutely anything inside a treasured first edition.
Your lunch is not ephemera.
Not yet, anyway.
A Bookmark Doesn't Just Remember the Page
The practical problem has barely changed.
A reader stops.
The book closes.
Something has to remember where to begin again.
Across centuries, that something has taken different forms because books themselves have taken different forms. Manuscript readers used finding aids suited to manuscripts. Bound volumes acquired ribbons and other markers. Industrial production made decorative and commercial bookmarks easier to create and distribute.
And readers kept improvising.
That may be the most recognisable part of the whole history.
A bookmark exists because reading happens in time.
We begin a book. We leave it. Life happens. Then we return.
The bookmark holds the interruption for us.
Sometimes it does something else as well.
Leave an ordinary object inside a book for long enough and the next time you find it, you may discover that it has been keeping two places at once.
And one in your life.