Bookmarks

 (c) 2012

Mr Quillan discovered the pamphlet wedged between pp. 134 and 135 of the copy of Elaine Pagels’s Adam, Eve, and the Serpent he had borrowed from the library. It was small, eight or so centimetres wide by roughly twice that long. The brochure consisted of four sheets of paper folded in half lengthwise and stapled together through the seam. In dramatic red type against a white background above a package gift-wrapped in red and tied with a green bow, the front page proclaimed ‘For Our Valued Patrons’ and ‘Claim Your Thank-You Rewards Now’. The inside pages contained pictures and descriptions of jewellery made with the cheaper gemstones, small household items,and gadgets. Beneath each description was a code number for ordering and an indication of the number of ‘power points’ needed to claim the item. Mr Quillan recalled receiving something similar from a credit-card company.

At first it struck him as a particularly unsuited to the Pagels book—a discussion of early Christian attitudes towards sex and sin and women and moral freedom paired with a commercial display of frivolous and unnecessary goods, toys for adults that would be used once and then tossed in a drawer to be forgotten. These items were fodder for charity shops or the annual parish fête. It was consumerism at its most pointless. It was rather like finding a photo of a page-three girl stuck in a Bible in a bedside drawer in a family-run B&B. But, Mr Quillan thought, perhaps it wasn’t so inappropriate after all. A secular intrusion into the sacred—what was religion if not a matter of inserting the sacred into the mundane? It was another reminder of the variety of influences on our lives.

Apparently the previous reader had been using it for a bookmark and had forgotten it. It wasn’t the first forgotten page marker Mr Quillan had found in library books. He had run across an appointment card from a dentist, receipts from cashpoints, shopping lists, handwritten notes, not to mention the more traditional form of bookmarks. The list of things people used to locate their stopping place was long and varied. He had been finding such objects more and more frequently of late. Since the library had inaugurated its automated self-service system for checking books out and returning them six years earlier, no one looked at the returned books and removed any stray items. With the computerised tracking system the library used, the borrower held each book’s barcode under the scanner until the machine beeped and then slid the book through a slot beside the scanner. Mr Quillan had noticed that the clerks who gathered the returns picked each book up, glanced at the call number, and then placed it on one of several carts for reshelving.

Whenever a bookmark tumbled from the pages of a book he had borrowed, Mr Quillan would put the book down and examine the marker, searching for information about the previous reader. He liked to imagine episodes in the lives of those who left these clues about themselves. Had the ‘Anne’ who had the dentist’s appointment inserted the card into the book when the dentist’s assistant had opened the door to the waiting room and called her name? Was she there for her semi-annual check-up or had a toothache brought her? It wouldn’t have been a toothache, he decided. Not a sudden and unexpected emergency. No, this appointment had been made ahead of time. The existence of the card with the date and hour of the appointment filled in with a biro argued that Anne had scheduled the visit. Perhaps an earlier examination had uncovered a problem, and she was paying a return visit. Or perhaps she had received the card at the end of an appointment and then used it for a bookmark while riding a bus or a train home or back to work. The card had slid down between the pages. Maybe Anne missed her appointment because she forgot about the card and failed to remove it before returning the book.

A cashpoint receipt might suggest a different story. Someone had withdrawn 150 euros at the Bridge Street branch of United Bank on 9 December 2007. A healthy balance of 7600 euros remained. Mr Quillan speculated how the sum had been used. Was it just spending money to be frittered away a few  euros at a time to buy lunch, cigarettes, a round of drinks in a pub? Or was it that week’s money? Mr Quillan knew people who budgeted that way—each week they took out a set sum that had to cover all expenditures during the upcoming week.

The shopping lists and notes were equally open to conjecture. Had the person who bought ‘500g mince, 4 pots, onion, carrot, tom paste’ made a Bolognese sauce and kept the potatoes for another day or had shepherd’s pie been on the menu? Was ‘J’s 10’ a reminder to be at Jim’s at 10:00 am or did the person owe Judy 10  euros?

Library books held other forms of messages from readers. The last reader of another recent book had used those yellow self-sticking notes to mark important points in the text. He, or she, had been a student, Mr Quillan decided. The sticky notes were a means of keeping track of passages to be quoted or discussed in a paper the student was writing. Each note was carefully positioned at the beginning of the paragraph, just after the indention on the first line. The reader was very methodical—most likely a woman. Women were more particular about such things than men, he had found. There was never any advance warning about the appearance of a note. Mr Quillan would turn a page and there would be one. He learned to pay particular attention to those paragraphs. The young lady was obviously an astute reader. He had gathered the first three notes he encountered in a neat pile to throw in the bin the next time he stood up. But then he began putting the sticky notes carefully back into place when he had finished reading that text under them. Perhaps the next reader would find the markers as beneficial as he had.

Other readers underlined passages in pencil or pen or made marks or wrote brief notes in the margins. Mr Quillan understood the marginal exclamation point as an indication that a previous reader had found some significance in the passage beside it. A particularly important passage might warrant a pair of exclamation points. He regarded three as an excessiveness bordering on hysteria, however. He shuddered inwardly when he saw three points in a row and thanked the book gods that he had been spared a face-to-face encounter with this over-reacting, self-indulgent idiot.

Of course, some of the underlinings and comments were incomprehensible. Why would anyone take the time to highlight ‘ “Hello, my darling Chatsworth,” said Cynthia brightly.’ or ‘He wore a green tie’? The last one he had found particularly annoying. ‘Green’ had been heavily underlined twice in red ink, with a large exclamation point in the same ink in the margin. The person had jabbed at the paper so hard as to raise a welt on the other side of the page. What significance had these readers found in these remarks? There were times when Mr Quillan suspected mischief at play and a dolt chortling to himself at the mystification of future readers of the book upon encountering these silly underlinings. He always saw the person behind these as male, a puerile boy no matter what his age.

Another of his pet peeves was the reader with illegible handwriting. Mr Quillan firmly believed that anyone who wrote in books owed it to future readers to write neatly. He hated it when he had to devote time to a futile attempt to decipher a marginal note. If such notes were written in pencil, he carefully erased them to spare future readers the annoyance of dealing with it. What was the point of scribbling?

Mr Quillan examined each of these marks carefully for information about the previous readers. Had they liked the book? Was the reader a student ploughing through the book as a class assignment looking for quotable passages and engaged in a symbol hunt in the attempt to decipher the ‘book’s meaning’ and write a paper that would gain a teacher’s approval? Or was the previous reader someone like himself—someone who read for pleasure and simply wanted to share the delight of finding a well-written sentence or an insightful thought? On the whole, Mr Quillan preferred readers searching for pleasure to those who read out of a sense of duty and to fulfil the requirements of a course. Occasionally, of course, one ran across an intelligent student whose marginal jottings challenged his reading. Such readers were treasures.

Mr Quillan welcomed these small intrusions of other people’s lives into his own. He wasn’t lonely, he told himself, and he wasn’t looking for friends. But it was nice to be part of a community, even one brought together in different places and at different times by their reading of the same copy of a book. The random community, now that was a notion he liked. Its very randomness promised a meeting of differences united only by the chance encounter over the pages of a book. The only certain characteristic that the group would share was a love of books. Mr Quillan had found that love to be more lasting than friendships or romance.

The new automated check-out system was an improvement, he supposed. It was said to save on labour costs, and it had been easy to master. But he missed the old days, when he had carried his three or four selections to the front desk and stood in line, surreptitiously examining the books others had selected and allowing them a glimpse of his, perhaps even exchanging comments with them about their choices. He had always enjoyed those brief encounters. There was, he had found, a camaraderie among library patrons. One didn’t have to introduce oneself or carry the conversation further. The interaction was short and to the point and ended when the first person had finished checking out. A brief smile and a nod was all that was necessary in parting. It was pleasant to have these transient moments of connection with a stranger. It was not unlike the chance encounter of finding a stray bookmark.

Mr Quillan also missed dealing with a librarian at the check-out desk. Mrs Sullivan, who had sat behind the desk on Saturday mornings for so many years, always took a moment to look at the books when he placed them on the counter. She would pull the stack closer, her head tilted back so that she could see the titles through the lower half of her bifocals. She often rewarded him by nodding her head in delight at his selections. He liked to think that she approved of his tastes. Occasionally she recommended another title or told him of a new acquisition that she thought he might like. If no one was waiting in line behind him, they might hold a quiet conversation about books, while she wrote his ID number and stamped the return date on the card in the pocket on the inside of the back cover. She always rocked the date stamp on the ink pad first and then carefully positioned it over the right box on the card before pressing it firmly down. Then she would put the card into the box on her desk. Finally she would stamp the return date on the flap of paper glued to the left-hand side of the back inside cover, close the cover, and hand the book to him with a smile. She always said, ‘See you next week, Mr Quillan.’

That was another thing he had liked about the old system—those sheets of paper with the date stamps at the back of the book. He liked to look at them and see how many people had read the book before him and how often it had been checked out. That, too, had made him feel part of a community. The new scanner printed out a receipt with the titles of the book and the due date, but those pieces of paper gave no indication of how many people had enjoyed the book before him or how popular it was.

Indeed, those flimsy paper receipts churned out by the scanners at the end of the check-out process were the most common of the forgotten bookmarks. It made sense. They were convenient and ready at hand. But they were less useful for Mr Quillan’s purposes. He found these receipts more frustrating than informative. They provided so little information about the borrower and what little information they did provide was uncertain. They recorded only a short version of the titles and the due date for the books checked out by a borrower at one particular visit. Most people, Mr Quillan found, checked out two or three books at a time. Not much could be gained from the list of abbreviatedtitles. Unless one knew the books, it was impossible to guess what qualities had attracted this particular borrower or what, if anything, linked this particular collection of books. And the date didn’t reveal much either. It might well indicate the last time this copy had been checked out. Or an earlier reader may have found the receipt in a book and then re-used it as a page marker. Often indeed, the book in which Mr Quillan found the receipt was not one of those listed on the receipt. The library’s patrons obviously used whatever came to hand as bookmarks.

One thing that puzzled him was the location of the bookmarks. He often uncovered them in the middle of books. Did they mark the page where a reader had abandoned the book? Or had they simply been stuck in at random and then forgotten as the reader continued further?

When the branch library near Mr Quillan’s flat had closed for remodelling, Mrs Sullivan had been transferred. She had not returned when the branch reopened. He sometimes wondered what had happened to her and he didn’t know who to ask. He knew so little about her despite having seen her almost weekly for twenty-some years. Well, that had been his experience. The pleasant people came and went.

Mrs Sullivan’s replacements were far from satisfactory.On the past few Saturday mornings, a young man—a student Mr Quillan thought—had been sitting behind the desk. He appeared to spend his time on duty doing his lessons. If someone had a problem with the scanner and asked him for help, he would dip his head and frown at his work to let the person know that his studies were being interrupted. He would laboriously and ostentatiously mark his place and then heave himself out of his chair with an effort, stomp over to the scanners, and quickly and, to Mr Quillan’s mind, disdainfully reset the scanner and run the book through it. Usually he flourished the scanned book in front of the person’s eyes for a second and shook it as if to say, ‘See. This is easy. Even an idiot like you can do this.’ He seldom spoke, and his behaviour conveyed his opinion that the patrons’ incompetence was taxing his patience, if not ruining his life. Mr Quillan resolved never to ask this youngster for help. He suspected that the young man would never enter a library again after he finished his course and found a full-time job. He hoped that it would be one more suitable to the young man’s meagre talents.

The machines were taking over. Mr Quillan seldom had occasion to go inside the bank now. The bank clerks made it clear that the cashpoint machines could handle most transactions and they were not to be bothered for ordinary withdrawals and deposits. In his last years at work, personal interaction had declined. It was so much easier for a person to send an email with a file attached than to photocopy a report and carry it to your desk, stopping to chat and gossip for a few minutes. No longer did anyone take the time to leave his or her ‘workspace’ and walk up or down a flight of stairs to meet with a co-worker. He himself had abandoned the practice when several colleagues made it clear that they would prefer to deal with questions by email rather than discussing them face to face. There were some of the newer hires that he had never met, even though he had exchanged many emails with them. He didn’t think they were avoiding him intentionally. It was just the new way of doing things.

Of course, the young didn’t like to talk with older people. He saw that in the clerks, even middle-aged ones,in stores. They might exchange a few remarks with people their own age, but older people such as himself got only an indifferent ‘Good morning, Sir. Find everything you needed?’ He could have said, ‘You were out of the bullets I needed for my revolver. Now I shall have to go somewhere else to find them. Pity because I was planning to rob someone on the way home to make up for your outrageous prices,’ and the clerk would nod, give him a vacuous smile and reply, ‘Good. That’s 22  euros 15, Sir.’ That was one lesson he had learned after he grew old. No one saw you when you grew old. At least the readers who left bookmarks or made notes in books didn’t care about his age.

Perhaps he should join one of the book discussion groups at the library. He had read the notices soliciting new members or inviting others to help form a group. There seemed to be a group for every interest. There was one for readers of mystery novels, another for fans of romance novels (Mr Quillan shuddered at the thought). One group specialised in discussing politics and economics and books on those subjects. There were easily ten discussion groups specifically for seniors that met during the day or on weekends. He had stood outside the door to the meeting room one day and pretended to examine the notice board while inspecting a reading group devoted to ‘the modern novel’. The group had consisted entirely of women and they were engaged in a loud discussion, everyone talking at once and no one listening. As far as Mr Quillan could determine—it was hard to disentangle the many threads of conversation—no one was discussing a book.

A table near the side wall held an assortment of baked goods. The members must have to contribute a snack. Cakes and biscuits dominated. It reminded him of the gifts of food Mrs Conlin had brought him when she moved into the flat above him. He had answered the knock on his door—that in itself was unusual; most visitors rang the bell from the lobby—only to be confronted by a stout woman holding a plate with a cake on it. She pushed it at him. ‘It’s me way of introducing meself, so. Me late husband—his name was Michael, just like yiself—said I made the best cake. I just bought flat 6B. Me husband died six months ago, and me daughter, that’s Nell, she thought that a flat would be easier for me than the house.’ It took her only a few minutes of nonstop chatter to begin hinting about shared excursions and meals. It had taken him much longer, far too long in fact, to make it clear—politely—to Mrs Conlin that he wasn’t available and wasn’t interested. He hadn’t invited her in and had to stand in the doorway to his flat, blocking her from entering while holding the plate with the cake in one hand and trying to close the door with the other. He remembered that the plate was sticky with icing. He had quickly consigned the cake to the bin, but for the sake of courtesy he waited a few days to return the plate. He had washed it and left it outside her door in a carrier bag early one morning with a short thank-you note. Luckily she had found more success with the man in 2A and had moved on. Now when they met, she merely nodded at him brusquely.

Mr Quillan looked at the group of women in the book discussion group. Many of them had that unattached look. He didn’t fancy another bout of fending off the advances of lonely women. There might be men who would welcome the attention, but he wasn’t one of them. When one of the women looked towards him, he quickly averted his gaze and pretended to be fascinated by a notice about upcoming visits to the children’s wing by the story lady.

In any case he was not one for groups. Even if he had found a group to his liking, he wasn’t sure that he could say anything intelligent about the books he read. He preferred to enjoy them quietly without worrying too much about why. Mr Quillan saw himself as a slow thinker. He wasn’t quick to form opinions. He knew that he was also not an agile conversationalist. Often he had to let a conversation percolate into his consciousness and steep there while he thought about what had been said. By the time he formulated a reply, the occasion for speaking had been lost and the conversation had moved on.

Mr Quillan replaced the brochure in the book, tucking it firmly into the centre seam so that it would not fall out. When he had first encountered the bookmarks, he had removed them and tossed them away. But then he had begun to replace them, returning each marker to the page where he had found it, for the next reader to find. Perhaps that person might spend a few moments, as he had, thinking about previous readers of the book. Perhaps he or she might toss it away without thought. It didn’t matter. What mattered was giving the next reader an opportunity to be part of this community. He wouldn’t break the chain.

He had finished the current batch of books. He thought with satisfaction of the passage he had underlined in one of them. He had refrained from pencilling a star in the margin. He reserved the stars for extremely well-written and thought-provoking passages. The particular passage had deserved only an underlining. One had to be responsible about the marks one made. It was a courtesy to subsequent readers. The third book hadn’t merited comment. He had contented himself with inserting an ancient sales receipt inside it. Perhaps the next reader would find some amusement in speculating what he had bought for £26 8/- at the Kingston Hardware Store in 1983 or wonder if the book had gone unread since that year.

Tomorrow morning he would visit the library and spend a half-hour choosing his reading for the next week. He would fan the pages looking for marks left by other readers. He often selected a book precisely because it had such indications of previous readings. Perhaps he might even find a ‘five euro’ book. Twice, sometimes three times, a year, he ran across a book so good that he stuck a five euro note within its pages for the next reader to find. It had been several months since he had found a deserving book. He was due for another. He had been doing that for two or three decades, beginning with the old Irish £1 notes and then switching to euros. Oddly the library bulletin never mentioned those gifts. Mr Quillan could only surmise that the lucky recipients chose to keep their find secret, but he liked to think that they returned often to the library in the hope of finding another fiver. It was his way of encouraging a community of readers.