Saturday, September 7, 2013

On your Bookmark, set, go!

i love books. and i love to pimp my books almost as much. no, i don't prostitute my books though there are certainly a lot of prostitutes in some of my books.
 one way i pimp my books is with bookmarks. i am so obsessed with bookmarks - using them and making them - that there was a time, before graduate school took over my life, that i was supplying bookmarks to the bookstore chain, Fully Booked. O di ba?

if you think about it, a bookmark does not have to be anything fancy and expensive. it can be a piece of tissue paper (you can come out now, readers of books in loos), a twig or a blade of grass, or even bread crust. but the same can be said of food. at the human needs level, what is the difference between odong with sardines and pasta pomodoro? take for example the bookmarks that are on these books i am currently reading:

from left to right, the bookmarks are a mailing envelop, a receipt from a gas station, a piece of product packaging, and a folded piece of tissue paper.

(by the way, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother is very VERY very funny)

i still make bookmarks to sell. some are over here. but sometimes i make them for personal consumption only. my current favorite, the one that is in between the weirdly fascinating crazy rich asians, is this cheesy tree bookmark:


i know i know. it is terrible painting. and that is why i emphasized personal consumption above.

how i made them is, again, so simple it is stupid.



first i cut lengths of stiff paper from used notebooks.

 then i painted stuff on them with acrylic paints or whatever stuff you have at home - crayons, craypas, housepaint, pens. whatever at all.



the nice thing about fancy bookmarks, homemade or not, is that you tend to have greater respect for them and thus tend to not lose them, as opposed to, say, a piece of Mentos wrapper.

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