From the book of Tiny Pleasures, I spotted this one:
When I did my recent book purge, I discovered that in the past, I had a tendency to grab whatever was handy to use as a bookmark (despite several posts this year featuring the abundance of bookmarks I own).
Here are a few of the things I found tucked into books I’m rehoming:
Three actual bookmarks: one with an inspirational saying, one from the Doris Day Animal League, to which I was a contributor long before I worked in animal rescue, and one with other state and Texas locations of Half Price Books.
Two business cards, one from the bookstore where I was employed as an assistant manager starting a few months after we moved to Houston, and one promoting The Deal and Three Fortunes In One Cookie, with contact information on the back.
A red ribbon decal that was probably part of a donation appeal from an HIV/AIDS-related organization.
A thank-you card from Amy after she spent a summer living on the second floor of our fifth Houston home (The Compound was our sixth, and Houndstooth Hall is our seventh; between our first and third, we spent the summer of 1990 living with Lynne and Craig. I guess we paid their hospitality forward with Amy; then here at the Hall, Lynne and Minute lived with us for a few weeks between homes). So many good friend memories.
I emailed Amy photos of the message she wrote inside the card, and we reminisced about those times. The envelope is postmarked September 1, 1994, when a postage stamp was 29 cents.
I don’t know, I usually find a bunch of words betwixt the pages of a book.
Recently, I have been reading Kirk Read’s How I Learned to Snap while having brunch at a local restaurant I like. It’s a thick pitch black hardback book with less than an inch of pages, with the paper sleeve off. But, it’s hard to keep open without a heavy weight on top. I suspect that’s because I may have only done this once before. Then, I discovered a non-punctured frequent buyer’s card from Bollo’s, Blacksburg, VA inside. Those memories definitely lifted my mood up higher. There hasn’t been a safe place like Bollo’s and Gillies around the places I’ve been in since.
I just took a virtual tour of Bollo’s, a place where I’d gladly have coffee and something sweet while reading. That led me to do a little research on Blacksburg, other than the tragedy with which I’m already familiar. I then placed the location where a peripheral character (mentioned only by association in the chapter I’m currently working on) lives as that city. See the impact you can have on someone’s creativity?