Bookmarks

 

My grandmother bristled with bookmarks. When she died, just short of her 100th birthday, her bedside table still crowded with books in various states of perusal, I discovered both that she’d left her library to me, and that her passion for slipping bits of paper into books was hereditary.  

As a boy, I would  spend hours looking at the books in her house, enjoying the gold and morocco bindings, the cloth coverings, the accumulated scents and feelings of more than a century’s reading. She was always generous. When I was around 12, she lent me her childhood copy of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales. It was bound in brown paper, as the dust jacket had been torn. At school, curious masters would peep over my shoulder as I read, in case, as my Maths teacher said, I was looking at naked ladies wrestling in mud.

It’s not as if I am lacking in books. I am sent dozens of new volumes a week, all bearing the eager promise of the newly produced. I would like to say that I look at and read them all; you might also see a pig flying over the rooftops of Kentish Town. I  have already (almost) merged my library with my wife’s considerable collection. I spent many happy hours identifying the duplicates (Catcher in the Rye,  A Room with a View, War and Peace, etc); these were initialled (in pencil), and sequestered in the country for weekend re-readings, as I can’t bear to be too far from a volume of Saki for too long. Triplicates went into the cupboard in the downstairs loo, or above my bed, for similar reasons. Have I given away or discarded any? Not bloody likely.

I already have my father’s childhood books; in his copy of Richmal Crompton’s Just William, his name was written in neat italics; I scrawled mine underneath. My son has already done the same. I recently unearthed my father’s Third Form Latin Vocabulary book, neatly printed initially, the handwriting getting steadily worse as term progressed. It’s on my desk, a reminder that education hasn’t change much since the 1960s.

And now here are yet more books, returning with me in boxes each time I visit my parents. Each volume cries out for attention: the lovely bindings of Pope’s Iliad (adding to the already ridiculous number of copies of that book on my shelves), for example. These are confettied with bookmarks: I have enjoyed trying to work out at what particular line my forebears stopped and gasped at the elegance or beauty of a line, enough to mark it for ever. I found a tiny, leatherbound copy of Much Ado About Nothing, inscribed with my grandfather John Womack’s name. The date was 1925. I had to look again, as this wasn’t far off his 5th birthday. I like to think of him carrying it around (it’s slightly foxed), much as I, in my twenties, used to keep a miniature copy of King Lear, in case I got stuck on a train. I already have four Complete Tennysons; now I have another. In a copy of his Poems, from 1893, I found a note: “Mr and Mrs Howard would be glad of Miss Muir’s acceptance of the accompanying volume … as a slight token of regard, and thanks for the kindness shewn to their daughter.” (That “shewn” almost floored me.) This Miss Muir was my great-great-grandmother; her kindness, the Howards, and their daughter long-forgotten. There are more bookmarks in this Tennyson,  clearly added in at different times, maybe even over the decades. Why  a particular part of ‘The Princess’ is marked I will never know, but it’s fun to guess.

Musty  tomes of Dickens, covers all but falling off, bear the name of Henry Martyn, John Womack’s grandfather (hailing from a godly Cornish family, one of whose members was captured by Barbary pirates, and then escaped the Sultan’s harem concealed in a barrel of rum). Martyn,  a gentleman, played the organ at a church, not far from where I now live in North London, where my Womack great-grandparents got married. I like to think that their books have winged their way home.

I’ve put a piece of paper into the Tennyson, with a note about Miss Muir. Perhaps my great-great-grandchildren will find it, and wonder too about those lives, only a few handshakes away, and yet so impossibly distant, bound together as the leaves of a book, each generation adding its own page. As for my ever-expanding collection: I hope that they won’t reach the charity shops and the second hand shelves. May they be found, still bearing their bookmarks, in guest rooms and lavatory cabinets for ever.