The Bookmark Project*

A sampling of items found in donated books and collected by bookstore volunteers. Photo illustration by Stacy Reich

When I was six years old and my brother was three, my parents bought their first car, a used Oldsmobile 88, and shortly thereafter we went on our first family road trip: New York City to Montreal, Canada. My dad had written away to AAA and in time, received in the mail a TripTik, a series of maps in a spiral bound notebook. Each page revealed a section of our route, having been highlighted by a AAA agent. The bulky envelope from the American Automobile Association also contained a TourBook filled with photos of exciting attractions we would be visiting in Montreal. These were the first of many TripTiks and TourBooks that my dad would write away for. He would take us to Massachusetts where we visited the sites of the battle that launched our country’s War of Independence. He brought us to Virginia where we drove the Skyline Drive, hiked on the Appalachian Trail, and learned the difference between a stalagmite and a stalactite at Luray Caverns. He took us to Pennsylvania where we were allowed to grab handfuls of Kisses from a passing wheelbarrow at the Hershey chocolate factory, and discovered Shoofly pie on an Amish farm. By the time I graduated from high school, my dad had filled the largest drawer in his desk with TripTiks and TourBooks, saving them as mementos of our family vacations.

On that first trip to Montreal, I would save two items of my own, keeping them for many years. At the age of six, I believed that the wrappers, en français, from a bag of M&Ms and a pack of Dentyne gum, would affect my life in some way, if I held on to them. Indeed, the memory, aided by my “souvenirs,” of being enchanted with the sound of the French language led me to choose to study French in school, and to visit France when I was in my 20s and 30s.

These are the roots of my lifelong addiction to saving stuff.

Decades later, I discovered the Friends of the Boca Raton Public Library when I moved nearby. The Friends is a non-profit organization that raises funds for major library projects and programs through membership dues, donations, and bookstore sales. The Friends Bookstore is located in the lobby of the downtown library and is run solely by volunteers. The minute I heard about it, I knew I wanted to join their effort.

I signed up to work in the bookstore and reported for training. During training, I learned that all of the books that are sold in the Friends Bookstore are used books donated by local citizens. Members of the community generously donate their fiction and non-fiction books, happy in the knowledge that sales of their books will help support the library in serving the public. In fact, during my training, a donor arrived with several boxes of books, providing the perfect opportunity for me to observe the process. I looked on as our volunteers quickly but expertly examined the books, accepting the ones that met our criteria. At this point the donor was ready to be on his way, so he was not there later on when the volunteers had time to carry out the next step, which was to quickly leaf through the pages of each book before putting it on the shelf. Any found items were to be thrown away. I watched in horror as volunteers removed greeting cards, family photos, shopping lists, and ticket stubs, and tossed them in the trash. I suppressed my crushing need to scream “Noooooooo!” as I witnessed postcards, doodles, to-do lists, and newspaper clippings being discarded without hesitation or sorrow. As an unrepentant hoarder of all things ephemeral, I could not make sense of what I was seeing.

“We simply do not have space,” it was explained, “to store found items.”

“We barely have enough room for the books, let alone the many items that people leave in those books.”

“Our mission,” I was reminded, “is to raise money for the library, and we must focus on that mission in order to achieve our goals. We must be pragmatic.”

As you may have guessed, pragmatism is not my prevailing character trait.

After my early experience with the French Canadian candy wrappers, I went on to save many more things that people usually throw away. While I have never required an intervention, I have, at times, needed to rent a storage unit to house a portion of my stuff. When I moved into a new apartment a couple of years ago, I was determined to fit the totality of my stuff into the confines of my furniture and the closets. This was a challenge because my apartment has only two small closets, and I don’t have room for any more furniture. In desperation, I turned to world-renowned tidying expert, Marie Kondo. I had heard about her method and was skeptical that it would work for me, but the eight, yes eight, bathtub-sized Rubbermaid bins in my bedroom motivated me to give it a try. I got her book “spark joy: an illustrated master class on the art of organizing and tidying up” and the first thing I noticed is that the title is all lower case. Is that because lower case letters take up less space than upper case letters, I wondered. I was in trouble before I even opened the cover. In the introduction, Kondo asks the reader if she is committed to tidying up and if the answer is no, her advice is to not read this book because “it could make things worse.” I didn’t see how things could get much worse so I forged ahead. Much of my excess belongings fall under the category of “papers” so I read that chapter first. “Chapter 6: Tidying papers. The basic rule for papers: Discard everything…”

Wait, what?? Forget it. I knew this wasn’t for me. I knew that the innocuous word “tidying” had to be a euphemism for something much more diabolical. No, I was not going to discard the papers I wrote in college, or the parking ticket I got in Brooklyn that reminds me to always check the street signs, or any artwork created by my kids, or any of their report cards, or any of my report cards, or my resumé from 1985, or any old photos, cards, letters, playbills, or journals. Or owner’s manuals (I don’t care that they’re all online now!)

I am, however, mindful of my environmental impact. I opt for paperless with all my bills and statements, I always choose to have receipts emailed to me rather than printed, I rarely use my own printer, and I mostly send e-cards to friends and family. But when there isn’t a choice, or something is given to me, my impulse is always to save it. I also recognize that it is a great privilege to have a home, to have a place to keep things that have meaning to me.

I carefully stow these mementos in boxes and bins. So when I started working at the Friends Bookstore and saw all the objects of sentiment and nostalgia that people use as bookmarks, I was astonished. I decided that all the items must have been left inside the books inadvertently; that there are innumerable people searching their homes in vain for that meatloaf recipe or that ticket stub from “Cats.” I knew what I had to do.

Shortly after my training concluded, I received permission to start saving every item found inside the donated books, on the condition that I bring it all home with me. I appropriated a small basket and enlisted all the volunteers to place found items in the basket, no matter how seemingly insignificant. Every week, I empty the basket and bring the contents home. Yes, I still have those giant Rubbermaid bins (I’m happy to report that I’ve gotten the number of bins down to seven, yay!) so it’s not like I have extra space to store other people’s stuff. Stuff that, it seems, nobody is missing. I’ve been told by several of my coworkers that in the 17-year history of the bookstore not one person has come back for something that they left in a book. Maybe some things are left behind inadvertently. And maybe some people let go of tangible items with intention and appreciation for how the items once served them. But as the bookstore’s self-appointed keeper of memories, I will continue, for as long as I can, to store that math homework from 2002, just in case its owner comes looking for it.

When my dad passed away a few years ago, I searched for a way to coalesce the objects that represented the things he loved the most and the things that we loved most about him. With my mom’s approval, I created and photographed a temporary collage that included such things as photos of him holding his newborn grandchildren, his teaching license, his first Frank Sinatra album, his favorite

out-of-print cookbook that he lovingly tried to hold together with duct tape, letters that my brother and I had written to him from sleep-away camp, stamps from his collection, and his Knicks baseball cap. But there was another item that was necessary for this memorial to be a true representation of my dad. It took a while to find, but I knew he would have saved it. In a folder in his file cabinet, there it was, the last AAA TripTik “Prepared Expressly” for him. My parents always lived in an apartment with limited space, so he was not able to save all the TripTiks and TourBooks that he once had. But he had saved this final one. As I held it in my hands, I recalled our long-ago adventures as a family, on the road, my dad at the wheel.

*As a footnote, some of the “bookmarks” that people leave in their donated books are actual bookmarks! When I started the Bookmark Project, I learned that one of our long-time volunteers had been offering customers their pick of a bookmark with a purchase. We continue to make found bookmarks available to our customers, when we have them, passing along the joy.

--- Stacy Reich