EXHIBITIONS AND DISPLAYS

THE QUIET ARCHAEOLOGY OF OBJECTS DISCOVERED BETWEEN PAGES

LUCIEN M. CHARTIER

March 20, 2026

From a display case filled with forgotten bookmarks emerges a larger story about reading, interruption, and the accidental archives that accumulate inside books. Receipts, letters, photographs, and pressed flowers reveal how books quietly gather fragments of human time. Long after a reader has moved on, the objects remain, waiting between the pages to be discovered again.

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It was the end of February, and I had spent much of the winter reading. I noticed the display almost by accident. I had come into the Lewis & Clark Library in Portland to return a copy of If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler (1979) by Italo Calvino, and was walking along the wall near the circulation desk when I saw a long case filled, rather unexpectedly, with bookmarks—hundreds of them. They were arranged behind the glass in a dense collage of paper, ribbon, cardboard, and plastic, pressed together in a way that felt both deliberate and slightly improvised, as though the collection had grown gradually over time rather than being designed all at once.

At first glance, it looked chaotic. The colors overlapped. Small shapes competed for attention. Thin printed bookmarks from libraries and bookstores stood beside handmade ones drawn in marker and crayon. A laminated bookmark with a tassel hung next to a strip of cardboard someone had cut unevenly with scissors. One small rectangle simply read “bookmark” in handwriting that looked like a child’s. These bookmarks had not been purchased or donated as part of a formal collection. They had been discovered inside books.

The librarians had found them while checking returned volumes. One reader had slipped a folded scrap of paper between the pages of a novel and forgotten to retrieve it. Someone else had placed a drawing inside a book and never came back for it. Over time, the bookmarks accumulated until someone decided to place them behind glass. Seen together, they formed something like an accidental archive.

A democracy of interruption: Every reader convinced their pause deserves an object.

The arrangement reminded me, faintly and somewhat absurdly, of the archival accumulations assembled by Gerhard Richter in his ongoing project Atlas (begun in 1962), a reflection not only on his own work but on the everyday world of images he has collected and photographed. Or of Aby Warburg’s vast cultural mapping project the Bilderatlas Mnemosyne (1924–29), where images from different periods and contexts are placed side by side in search of unexpected correspondences. Even, in a more distant way, of Hanne Darboven’s monumental accumulations of paper and notation such as Kulturgeschichte 1880–1983 (1980–83). The comparison is imperfect, of course. These were not artworks or scholarly documents. And yet there was more going on.

Standing there in front of the display, I found myself studying the small details. Some bookmarks advertised literacy programs or summer reading campaigns; others promoted bookstores, their phone numbers printed in tiny type at the bottom. A few looked decades old, their colors faded, the paper softened by handling. One carried a quotation about the pleasures of reading. Another showed a cartoon dragon reminding children to keep turning pages. Many were ordinary. None was rare. Yet together they created a strange impression, a collective portrait of readers who had never met one another. Standing there, I began thinking about the quiet history of that small object.

Rotating bookmark: A machine for hesitation, precise enough to measure indecision.

The bookmark is so ordinary that it rarely attracts attention. It exists almost invisibly within the life of a book. Yet it appears in the historical record surprisingly early, emerging shortly after the physical form of the book itself changed. In the ancient world, texts were most often written on scrolls. A scroll unfolds sequentially, and one reads forward by unrolling the text and backward by winding it again. The physical structure of the scroll encourages continuity. One reads until the scroll ends. Interruption is inconvenient.

The codex changed this. Between the second and fourth centuries of the Common Era, the codex, a bound book with pages, gradually replaced the scroll throughout the Mediterranean world. The codex was more compact, allowed readers to flip quickly between sections, and made it possible to gather multiple texts within a single volume. But the codex also introduced a new problem: Once texts were divided into pages rather than unrolled in sequence, readers needed a way to remember where they had left off.

The bookmark appeared in manuscripts not long after the codex itself. Medieval books often contain narrow strips of parchment or leather inserted between pages. Some manuscripts included ribbons sewn directly into the spine. Others used small tabs protruding from the edges of pages so that passages could be located quickly. These early bookmarks were not decorative; they were practical tools. Monks reading scripture might use several at once—for instance a passage in the Psalms marked with one ribbon, and a commentary marked with another. The bookmark functioned as an early navigational device within the architecture of the codex.

Before bookmarks, devotion itself held the place. (Jan van Eyck, Madonna with Canon van der Paele)

For centuries bookmarks remained functional objects, sewn into books or improvised from whatever materials were available. Only later did they acquire decorative forms. By the nineteenth century, the bookmark had entered the domain of domestic craft and gift culture. Silk bookmarks embroidered with religious verses circulated widely among Protestant readers in Europe and the United States. Lace bookmarks were exchanged between friends, while others were woven with elaborate patterns commemorating churches, historical events, or literary figures. Reading in the nineteenth century was often framed as a moral activity associated with self-improvement and reflection, and the objects placed inside books mirrored that atmosphere. A bookmark might carry a short prayer or a biblical verse, serving as both marker and reminder.

Later still, the bookmark entered the small promotional economy of modern print culture. Publishers, bookstores, and libraries began producing inexpensive printed bookmarks in large quantities and distributing them freely to customers or visitors. Anyone who has spent time in a bookstore recognizes them—narrow strips of paper announcing upcoming novels, author readings, literary festivals, or campaigns encouraging children to read more. Many of the bookmarks in the display case in Portland belonged to this category. They promoted literacy programs or bookstores whose addresses appeared in cheerful fonts at the bottom of the card. Yet the display suggested something else as well.

Readers do not always use purpose-made bookmarks. Often they reach instead for whatever small, flat object happens to be nearby—a receipt from a grocery store, a train ticket from a journey long completed, a postcard, a folded letter, a photograph. The bookmark, in practice, is frequently improvised. Standing in front of the glass case, I realized that the bookmark marks more than a place in a text. It marks time.

A man composed entirely of what he has not finished reading (Arcimboldo, The Librarian)

A book is not only a container for text. It is also a temporary container for human time. Each bookmark preserves the moment when someone paused, closed the book, and returned to the rest of life—the train arriving, the phone ringing, the evening growing late. Reading rarely unfolds in uninterrupted blocks. It happens in fragments—a few pages before sleep, a chapter on a metro ride, a paragraph while waiting for an appointment. The bookmark preserves the fragile continuity between those fragments.

Yet it is not only bookmarks that readers leave inside books. Anyone who works in a library or secondhand bookstore becomes familiar with the quiet archaeology of objects discovered between pages. Books arrive at the circulation desk or the counter carrying small remnants of the lives of their previous readers. A grocery receipt slips out when the book is opened, or a ticket from a theater performance, a folded note, a photograph whose subjects are unknown. Sometimes the objects are mundane, and sometimes they are unexpectedly intimate. Librarians often speak of these discoveries with curiosity. A postcard mailed decades earlier, a shopping list written in hurried handwriting.

Occasionally the discovery is historically interesting: a railway ticket from the nineteenth century, a wartime ration coupon printed in the 1940s, a theater program marking a performance long forgotten. More often, the objects remain stubbornly anonymous. The names written on them mean little now, the addresses refer to places that may no longer exist, the photograph shows faces no one can identify. In this sense books function as accidental archives.

Unlike formal archives that libraries, museums, and other collections carefully catalogue and preserve, these archives arise without intention. They exist because readers use books as temporary containers for the small materials of everyday life. The book closes around the object, and the object waits there until the book is opened again, perhaps by someone else entirely.

Among the most delicate objects discovered in books are plants. Pressed leaves and flowers appear frequently enough that librarians and booksellers almost expect them. They slip quietly from the pages of old volumes, flattened and fragile, their colors faded but still faintly recognizable. A violet, a clover leaf, a fern.

For centuries readers have used books as convenient presses for plants. Arrange the flower carefully and artfully, close the book, and the weight of the pages gradually flattens the specimen as it dries. Naturalists in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries used this technique deliberately, turning books into temporary herbariums before specimens were transferred to formal collections. But many pressed plants found in books have nothing to do with scientific documentation. They appear to have been placed there for more personal reasons: a flower plucked during a walk, a leaf picked up in autumn, a small plant collected from a place someone wished to remember.

A bookmark that forgot it was meant to be temporary.

Once the book closes, the plant remains hidden until someone opens the pages again. When discovered years later, the object retains a peculiar stillness. It no longer belongs entirely to the natural world, yet it has not become entirely an artifact. It remains suspended somewhere between memory and evidence.

The book, once again, functions as a temporary archive, preserving not only the leaf or flower but also the moment in which someone decided to place it there.

The rise of digital reading might have been expected to change this relationship between books and the objects they hold. When such devices first became widespread, many observers predicted that the printed book, and perhaps libraries themselves, would soon disappear. But printed book did not vanish. Libraries did not become obsolete. And the bookmark survived.

Digital reading platforms contain their own version of the bookmark, usually represented by a small icon in the corner of the screen. The function remains identical: The reader marks a place and returns to it later. The gesture has been preserved even though the material object has disappeared.

What digital reading cannot reproduce, however, is the quiet accumulation of objects that physical books carry within them. An electronic text cannot hold a pressed flower or a folded letter. It cannot preserve a train ticket. It cannot produce the small moment of surprise that occurs when a forgotten object falls from a book onto a table. The digital bookmark records location. The physical book gathers traces.

The objects left inside books—bookmarks, letters, photographs, pressed plants—form a dispersed archive of reading moments that digital systems cannot easily replicate. Each object carries a fragment of the life that surrounded the act of reading.

A delicate command: Stop here, but do so elegantly. 

The display case in the library in Portland made this visible. At first it appeared to be simply a collection of bookmarks, but the bookmarks also pointed toward the broader ecology of objects that move quietly through books. Each bookmark marks a pause. Each forgotten object marks a life briefly intersecting with a text.

And the book itself becomes something more than a vessel for printed words. It becomes a place where time, memory, and material traces accumulate. An archive assembled not by historians or curators but by readers themselves, one interrupted moment at a time.

When I left the library that afternoon, the display case remained where it was, the bookmarks still pressed together behind the glass. Each one marked the place where a reader had once stopped, a small fragment of time preserved between pages like an artifact quietly waiting to be discovered.

Lucien M. Chartier (born 1979 in Saguenay, Québec) studied library science and the material history of books at the École Estienne in Paris. His research focuses on the physical life of books and the accidental archives that gather quietly within them. He now lives outside Portland, Oregon, and teaches wordless writing and other quiet forms of literature at Reed College.

Cover image: Reading leaves traces, but not always where the author intended.