| |
| |
|
"The need for some device to mark the place in a book was recognized at an early date. Without bookmarkers finely bound volumes were at risk. To lay a book face down with pages open might cause injury to its spine, and the crease on a page that had had the corner turned down remained as a lasting reproach."
|
| |
- A. W. Coysh
Collecting Bookmarkers (1974)* |
In his classic description, A. W. Coysh assigned three functions to bookmarks. First and foremost is the desire for a placemarker or reference holder to allow the reader to return to a specific location in a bound volume. The ancillary functions of spine preservation and dog-ear prevention are consequences of the natural human proclivity to preserve a location for the purpose of a return visit where the bound volume lacks a physical placeholding capability and, in fact, the desire to mark was potentially injurious to the book.
In the contemporary world of mass production and inexpensive raw materials, it is difficult to comprehend the importance of volume preservation - unless, of course, one is a librarian or curator. As technology moves rapidly toward the replacement of printed works by electronic media, the function of bookmarks has evolved to the convenience of placeholding and rapid retrieval of previously viewed or marked information on the web. The essential and original purpose of bookmarks is diminished, or at least altered. Or is it?
In his book, Coysh limits treatment of bookmark history to the latter half of the second millennium, and in the context of his bookmark definition, his approach is logical. A reader of stone tablets likely had more to be concerned about in life than holding a place on a piece of stone for later reference, and injured spines and dog-eared pages were certainly not a concern.
The advent of alternative writing surfaces such as parchment presented an opportunity to record much more information in writing, beyond the limited messages of Kings' decrees scribed in stone and brief ideas expressed within the bounds of bark, wood and bone. Scrolls permitted a significant quantity of writing and ideas to be conveyed in a single volume, both convenient and portable. However, without a spine and having no page corners to fold, the demands on a scroll placeholder were functionally limited compared to bookmarks of later centuries.
It is the evolution of books that ascribed function to placeholders as defined by Coysh. He attributes early and common bookmarker use to placeholding and bound volume preservation for Bibles, and he cites an early silk bookmarker given to Queen Elizabeth in 1584. Coysh reasoned that this bookmarker, a gift to the Queen by a printer awarded the sole right to print the Bible and other official books and proclamations, was made of silk as a natural consequence of the printer's parallel trade as a draper.
Through the mid-19th century, silk bookmarkers evolved as narrow ribbons bound to volumes. The onset of industrialization coincided with rapid changes in bookmarker construction and purpose. Embroidered bookmarkers became associated with attached water color drawings from the 1850s to the 1870s. Finally, in the 1880s, paper became a favored bookmark medium. Coysh refers to the 1880-1901 period of bookmark evolution as "The Victorian Advertising Period", when "most of these advertisements were brash and insensitive" in the form of either multiple advertisements on a single bookmark, or were focused on single products such as soap, ladies garments and other consumer goods. As advertising became socially acceptable, bookmarks followed, evolving to respectable and desired forms of advertising for major companies and, finally, as a common means to publicize and send greetings.
Graphic design, as a profession, was in its infancy during this early period. A review of late 19th century paper bookmarks with multiple advertisements reveals much in common with the modern classified ad column, enhanced by the popular artwork of the early industrial era. Notably, designers and makers of early paper bookmarks felt compelled to explicitly state the purpose of the printed products by specifying function, often in large type: "Book-Mark", "Book Mark" and the wonderfully certain directive, "Use This as a Bookmark", are examples of the hope, or perhaps concern, that recipients should retain and use the bookmark and its advertisements for future reference.
A 1970s Royal Air Force Recruiting bookmark shown by Coysh consists only of this command:
PLEASE
DO NOT MARK
YOUR PLACE
BY
TURNING DOWN
THE CORNER
OF A PAGE
____
USE THIS
Historically, the timing of the Royal Air Force directive is particularly ironic. Missing from the command is any concern for the integrity of the spine. The bookmark's functional integrity had become confined to concern for ripped and bent pages caused by readers. The world was at the threshold of the mass computing era, and an entirely new and unanticipated use for Bookmarks was about to appear. Placeholding, the human proclivity to mark a location for later return, was to re-assume a dominant societal role without concern for the physical integrity of the medium.
In 1980, the concept of electronic bookmarks was established when Tim Berners-Lee wrote a program named "Enquire-Within-Upon-Everything", allowing "links to be made between arbitrary nodes". Berners-Lee's idea evolved to become the 1990 version of his WorldWideWeb program, the first web browser, where "links" (screen snapshot, 250k) are used as the first functional web bookmarks. In 1992, development began on the Mosaic browser, the conceptual predecessor to Netscape Navigator and the proliferation of public Internet access. Bookmarks are now an established and standard component of web navigation, and have most recently evolved as "Live Bookmarks", the most popular now using RSS feeds to provide continuous bookmark updates.
Across time, bookmarks evolved slowly at first, but have been quickly updated and revised with the advancement of technological change. Create the world's oldest known web bookmark on your own pc by visiting and bookmarking this page, last revised on November 13, 1990. Just four years after this historic page was created, in 1994, two graduate students assembled a world wide web bookmark collection. Thrilled and willing to share, they published their list on the web. It is known today as Yahoo!.
Now, at BookmarkMyWebsite.com, we have brought together the traditional bookmark placeholder and combined it with the state-of-the-art bookmark technology on the Internet.
The evolution continues.
*Coysh, A. W. Collecting Bookmarkers. Drake Publishers Inc., New York. 1974. Printed in Great Britain.
|
|
|
| Questions? Contact Us! |
 |
|
