FREE BOOKMARKS FREE

[touchingcloth]

I was in a book shop for the first time in ages yesterday, and as I was flipping through the titles I noticed that about 75% of them came with a bookmark slipped into the middle pages somewhere. Just a crappy cardboard thing, mostly with a design that was a variation on the dust jacket, but sometimes an advert for similar titles from the same publisher.

It was multiple different publishers that were doing this (I'm not sure if they were ultimately imprints of the same business, but I wouldn't be surprise), and the biggest caveat is that this was a shop in Portugal, where shopping for books isn't something I've done a lot of.

Is the same thing happening in the Waterstones and The Barnes & The Noble?

[madhair60]

Wow, Hulk Hogan can't even give away his new autobiography

[shoulders]

Of course this originated from the 'Bookem Arc', a Victorian invention made from 18 brass parts that would slide across the page then fix any book to the point you had last looked at.

[buttgammon]

A lot of indie bookshops seem to do this, and it's definitely more common in continental Europe. I have a big stack of them from Charlie Byrne's in Galway, because they always leave loads of them on the counter. As a rule, anywhere that has branded tote bags is going to have bookmarks too.