Up: [[My Personal Canon]] Created: 2025-07-03 I was in the remainders section of an Indigo bookstore, looking for inexpensive coffee table books with great images that I could chop up and use in collages. One oversized book was sealed in plastic but the cover images made it look as if there might be good stuff inside, so I bought it. ![[Book Marks book cover.webp|400]] That book is *Book Marks* by Barbara Page. It has two subtitles which, combined, beautifully explain its contents: *an artist’s card catalogue* and *notes from the library of my mind*. The backstory is this: Barbara, an avid reader and visual artist, discovered an old library checkout card in a book that she borrowed in 2008. For anyone too young to know about checkout cards, which were phased out with the advent of online circulation systems in 1998-2000, cards were the pre-digital form of tracking. The book’s ‘address’ (author name, title, location code) was printed at the top. The borrower would fill in the blank under “Borrower’s Name,” hand the card to the library clerk, who stamped the due date, filed it in a box by date, and gave the borrower a paper slip reminder so that overdue fines could be avoided. Barbara kept the card, and ‘summarized’ the plot with a pictogram in the space below the book address. That was her first Book Mark, although she initially didn’t have that name for them. That came later when she bought a two drawer card catalogue from an antique store, labelling one drawer ‘Book’ and the other ‘Marks’. As Barbara explains, making ‘bookmarks’ into two words allowed her to emphasize both marking the cards and them serving as markers of her reading history. I LOVE this idea and promptly ordered 2000 checkout cards from Carr McLean, a Canadian library supply company. The criteria I’m using for making the cards suggests I may have over-ordered by a thousand or more cards, but that’s okay. They’re here if I need them. #### My Criteria for Making Book Marks - Only for books that have been a four or five out of five for me. In other words, books that are part of my personal canon or are canon-adjacent. See [[Having a Personal Canon]]. - Barbara challenged herself to avoid reproducing the book’s cover, instead looking for some eclectic detail that was personally meaningful to her and then coming up with an image to represent that detail. This is challenging for books I’ve read recently, and could be really tough for some/most books from the past. - I’m putting a favourite quote from the book on the back of each card. Or sometimes a review comment if I have one. Again, this is a challenge for any books not currently in my possession. #### Practicalities Barbara date stamps and files her Book Marks according to their year of publication. I’m more interested in what age I was when I read the book. Memory is sure to fail so when I get my card catalogue drawer (Micheline is looking for me), I’ll make tabs that span five years of my life. I think/hope that I can accurately assign a book to a specific time period. This will be easier for certain times, like childhood where I have a high degree of confidence that the *Dr. Seuss Cat in the Hat Dictionary* belongs behind the 0-5 tab. A confession. While I got the checkout cards right away, it was over a month before I found a date stamp. I scoured the internet using the term ‘year stamp’ which always turned up stamps with date, month and year. I thought I might need to make a custom order until I finally clued in to look for a ‘four digit stamp.’ It turns out they’re not extinct after all. Barbara says that paint won’t do well on these cards and I suspect she’s right. She uses rubber stamps, stickers, collage pieces, and pencil crayon. I’ve started with those things but am going to experiment a bit. After all, I have enough cards to sacrifice a few! Watercolours and acrylic inks likely aren’t great, but I wonder if acrylics or gouache, lightly applied, might work. #### Examples Here are the first three cards I made, back on June 5th. While each card on its own is nothing special, I think the accumulation of cards will be terrific. What a great way to honour the meaningful books I’ve read over my lifetime! ![[SOAP 2025-06-05.webp]] #### Barbara’s Book Barbara’s book includes 408 library checkout cards arranged on double page spreads. Each plate is referenced in the margin at the appropriate point in the text which is a memoir of various stages of her life as recounted through the memories activated by recalling the books she was reading at the time. She writes, *By interweaving the artworks with events from my life, I hope to underscore the interplay between our experiences and our reading, and how memory shapes or reshapes each, reflecting both our lived and imagined lives.* Barbara is in her seventies and had, at time of publication, nearly seven hundred Book Marks cards reflecting *my intellectual and emotional development over seventy-odd years, roughtly paralleling American history since World War II.* Hopefully it goes without saying that *Book Marks* won’t be chopped up for use in collages. It is, for me, at least canon-adjacent, maybe even part of my personal canon.