The Ethology of the Forgotten Bookmark
I once found a bookmark in a second-hand copy of Marcus Aurelius that was nothing more than a slender, dried blade of grass. It was tucked neatly beside a passage on the impermanence of all things. It felt less like a placeholder and more like a deliberate annotation, a quiet joke from a stranger. This silent collaboration got me thinking less about the text it marked, and more about the marker itself. We tend to treat our reading tools as functional, casual things. But what if we studied them, as an ethologist would, not as inert objects but as artifacts of behaviour?
Ethology, the study of animal behaviour in natural conditions, is a discipline of patient observation. It asks not just ‘what’ an animal does, but ‘how’ and ‘why’ it does it in the context of its environment. It looks for patterns, interruptions to patterns, and the traces left behind. We can apply this lens to our own habitats of reading. The books on our shelves are not a sterile archive; they are a living record of our intellectual and emotional ecology. The forgotten bookmark is a spoor, a track left in the soft earth of a text.
Consider the taxonomy. The hastily folded receipt suggests a reader interrupted, a thought suspended mid-air at a cafe counter. The pristine, gilt-edged cardstock implies a ritualistic care, a reader who approaches the act with ceremony. The train ticket from a journey completed years ago tells a story of travel, of a mind transported both by the landscape outside the window and the one on the page. The child’s crayon drawing, pressed like a flower between chapters, marks not just a stopping point but a profound intersection of worlds—the domestic and the literary.
We can observe the placement. Is the bookmark placed at the end of a chapter, signalling a planned, orderly retreat? Or is it jammed mid-paragraph, indicating an urgent summons away from the page? A pile of them, clustered in the final third of a dense history, might reveal a reader’s struggle, a determined push towards a distant finish line. These are not mistakes or clutter; they are data points. They are the tangible evidence of a mind engaging with a text, a fossilised moment of attention.
The Behaviour of the Reader, Preserved
Why does this matter? Because in our rush towards frictionless digital reading, where a ‘bookmark’ is a uniform, invisible algorithmic flag, we lose this rich sediment of behaviour. The digital bookmark leaves no scent. It tells no story of a Tuesday afternoon in a park, or a sudden rainstorm that sent a reader scrambling, leaving a boarding pass to hold their place for eternity. By studying these physical traces, we practice a kind of literary ethology on ourselves. We become observers of our own intellectual rituals.
So, the next time you open an old book—your own or a stranger’s—and a slip of paper flutters out, don’t discard it as debris. Observe it. What does its material, its placement, its very existence say about the creature that left it there? That blade of grass in my copy of Aurelius was a perfect memento mori, a piece of the natural world inserted into a text about it. It was a behavioural tic that became a piece of philosophy. In learning to read the bookmark, we learn to read the reader, and in doing so, we perhaps understand a little more about the enduring, embodied craft of reading itself.
Notes & further reading
A few pages I came back to while writing this: