In addition to being a bookmark collector I am also a SoulCollage® practitioner and facilitator.

On World Bookmark Day, 25 March 2024, I brought these two 'hobbies' together when I made a SoulCollage® card about myself as a Bookmark Collector. I created the card digitally in Canva.
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I Am a bookmark collector.
I Am One Who is an avid reader who also collects books and bookmarks.
Collecting bookmarks is an enjoyable and a somewhat addictive activity!
I have learned so much, about so many things, from going down numerous research rabbit holes to find out about the bookmarks in my collection.
I have also met so many wonderful bookmark collectors from all around the world and felt part of an interesting, supportive, and understanding community.  We all get it!
Long live the bookmark!

Back in April I posted about an exchange of bookstore bookmarks with Alice Lowe.  In that post I mentioned that Alice, "a freelance writer, avid reader and Virginia Woolfophile in San Diego, California", was writing an essay on bookmarks. Alice's essay, Marking Time and Place, has now been published in the South 85 Journal and you can read it 👉🏼 HERE.  It's a wonderful story about Alice's love of bookstores and collecting giveaway bookmarks from them.

Drum roll please!

You can now keep up to date with the Mark My Place! website and blog on FaceBook. 

To like and follow....

Click below 👇🏼

It's nearly time for World Bookmark Day (WOBODA) again, organised by the International Friends of Bookmarks (IFOB). 25 February 2022 marks the sixth WOBODA.  On this day "​We celebrate the readers' little helper and the ever faithful companion of books for 2000 years."

There are various activities for IFOB members such as a bookmark raffle and bookmark designing.  We members are also encouraged to create local events that share and promote bookmarks.  

Due to the Covid pandemic, I and many others, are unfortunately unable to organise these local events right now.  Instead, this year, I have decided to celebrate WOBODA here on Mark My Place! by posting this blog article about my cyber bookmark collection on Pinterest.

MARK MY PLACE ON PINTEREST

Several years go, I created a board on Pinterest called 'Mark My Place'.  To this board I pin bookmarks according to categories (sections) I set up.  This board currently has 18,595 pins and thousands of followers!

👉  MARK MY PLACE!

I subsequently created some other bookmark boards, categorised thematically:

👉 BOOKMARKS: ANIMALS which has 3,377 pins

👉 BOOKMARKS: WOMEN which has 698 pins

👉 BOOKMARKS: FOOD & DRINK which has 342 pins

These pins are ones I find already on Pinterest, ones I add from my personal bookmark collection, and ones I find in various places on the Internet, including on eBay.

Enjoy looking at all these different kinds of bookmarks!  There are SO many kinds of bookmarks!

​Happy World Bookmark Day!

PS:  Here is one of my favourite bookmarks that I pinned on Pinterest.  I do not actually have this bookmark in my physical collection, but I love having it in my cyber collection.

I was Googling recently, looking for an image unrelated to bookmarks, and a clipart of a book with a bookmark came up in my search results.  This set me off on a fun trivia tangent to specifically look for bookmarks in clipart.  There are lots of them!  Here are a selection of what I found.  Most of the bookmarks represented in the cliparts are ribbon bookmarks.

On 25 February 2020, World Bookmark Day, I was delighted and thrilled to receive the news from Laine Farley of the International Friends of Bookmarks that I had been selected as the second Asim Maner Award winner, an annual award for promoting bookmarks.  I am honoured to receive this award in the name of the late Asim Maner, who was an avid bookmark collector, promoter of bookmark collecting and a manufacturer of unique and beautiful bookmarks. 

While I have been very tardy in writing this blog post, one year after receiving the award, I continue to cherish my award certificate and its accompanying letter, along with the fabulous bookmark prizes I received.  At the time of receiving these I thanked each person individually and privately for their generous donations.  With this blog post, I also now thank them publicly.  Thank you Laine Farley, Georg Hartong, Frank X. Roberts, Ana Matos, and Gaby Dondlinger.

Long live bookmarks, bookmark collecting and the promotion of both!

​- Debrah Gai Lewis

Great to see a bookmark featuring prominently in this humorous artwork by Eric Lobbecke in the newspaper, The Weekend Australian, August 10-12, 2019.  There it is at the very top left of the page and it again appears behind the child sitting on her plush armchair reading the "Never Ending Story" which is upside down!  LOL!

Meanwhile Mum is in her beach attire sipping on a cocktail while reading her ebook, the dog is trying to get someone interested in a walk and the cat wistfully looks at several book pages floating away in the breeze.  Love it!

Just discovered these fun bookmarks and the how-to on YouTube.  This coffee lover loves this idea! Shall find some time soon to make some and add them here on my blog.  Meanwhile, it's time for a cup of coffee!

...is an interesting article on bookmarks and bookmark collecting by Kerrie More, published in Issue 29 of UPPERCASE Magazine (Canada).

Really like this whimsical drawing "Some Potential Bookmarks" by Grant Snider which I discovered on his website Incidental Comics.  I have definitely used more than one of these items as a bookmark!

​Grant Snider's wonderful work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, The Kansas City Star, The Best American Comics 2013, and all across the internet. A collection of his comics, The Shape of Ideas, will be published by Abrams in  April 2017.

Read this great AbeBooks article about 66 of the bookstores on Route 66 in America.

Wouldn't it be great to visit them all, buy some books and best of all.... collect a bookmark from each of the bookstores!  Now there is a wonderful aspiration!