Bibliophemera

Here is a Foyles bookmark, complemented by a model of a van the bookstore used (or may have used) long ago to transport inventory to and from its shop. Foyles was founded in 1903 by the Foyle brothers and today they are still independently owned. But they've branched out from the flagship location on Charing Cross Road, a London street known for its booksellers and put in the spotlight in Helene Hanff's 84 Charing Cross Road . Penny Mountain and Christopher Foyle authored a history of the book store in 2003 to celebrate a century of business: Foyles: A Celebration . I've had the bookmark for awhile now, but the model van is a recent purchase thanks to an unintended search result on ebay. It reminded me of the old Matchbox Cars I collected as a kid. And like the Matchbox Cars, the Foyles van was made in England. This model is Issue 25, a Morris Minor Van in the Days-Gone line made by Lledo, a company co-founded in 1982 by the former president of Matchbox, coincidentally. T...

Things that readers leave behind in their books are referred to as flyaways. Sometimes these things are used as bookmarks, sometimes the book is just a convenient place to stash something for safekeeping. Now where did I put that twenty dollar bill? I've never found money between the pages of a book. I usually find the more typical ephemera like scraps of paper, deposit slips, receipts, envelopes, and gum wrappers. But I've also found autographed baseball cards, long newsy letters, utility bills, airline tickets, and photos. See thingsinbooks.com for more examples of the interesting, unusual, and downright strange flyaways that people find in their books. The most interesting (or perhaps most touching) thing I ever found was a small collection of Valentine cards and notes from two little girls to their father, penned about 1960. I found them several years ago and thought they must have been put in the book for safekeeping and were long forgotten. I decided somebody should get...

I found a bookmark the other day, which I can't read, in a book that I also can't read. Both are in Russian language, printed with the Cyrillic alphabet. I took a semester of Russian in the early to mid 1990s, thinking it might come in handy with my writing/editing work at NASA. It didn't. Some of our astronauts, civil service personnel, and contractors were taking courses in Russian and traveling to Russia for work with the International Space Station. It couldn't hurt in that environment to have some knowledge of the language and culture of our Russian counterparts, right? Well, Russian for me was a "painful" language to learn, so yeah, it did "hurt." I was also taking Spanish just because I liked the language, excelled at it in grade school and later grades, and I wanted to get reacquainted with it. Spanish was a cake walk. Russian was an ordeal. About all I remember is a chunk of the Cyrillic alphabet and some of the sounds associated with indivi...