Somebody invented a better bookmark
This will only be exciting to those of us who still read physical paper books. But like. Guys. They did it. They invented the perfect bookmark.
Classic paper bookmarks fall out easily. You have to put them somewhere while you read the book. And they only tell you that you left off reading somewhere in that particular two-page spread.
Enter the Book Dart. It’s a tiny piece of metal folded in half with precisely the amount of tension needed to stay on the page. On the front it’s pointed, to indicate an exact line of text. On the back, there’s a tiny lip of the metal folded up to catch the paper when you want to push it onto a page. It comes in stainless steel, brass or copper.
They are so thin, thinner than a standard cardstock bookmark. I have books with ten of these in them and there’s no obvious extra bulk. (They’re definitely thicker than those annotation flag stickers, so if you wanted to put several dozen of these in a book you’d run into an issue.) You might think that the amount of tension the metal needs to always stay on the page would be enough that you’d damage the page when putting it on or taking it off, but it’s not. I’ve used over a hundred of these and have never ripped the page.
I think Book Darts are a Pareto improvement for normal fiction book reading. But as a math researcher, I find that they’re way better for the use-case of marking places in textbooks. If I’m confused about Baire’s category theorem, I can look it up in the index, stick a Book Dart in each of the three places it’s referenced, and position them to point at the exact lines. I can put the book back on the shelf and they won’t shift position, so when I pick up my studying next week I can experience something closer to restoring all the tabs in my browser session.
I’m also the kind of reader that sometimes benefits from having a marker of what line I’m currently reading. On web pages, I’ll always scroll such that I’m reading the line that’s at the top of the page. With Book Darts, I frequently bump the dart down one paragraph, so that when I go back to reading I won’t waste a few seconds scanning for my place. If the page is thin enough, then I can sometimes slide the dart down in real time as I’m reading. They’re like having a real-life cursor for everything you’re in the middle of reading.
It looks like Book Darts are only produced by this one company, who doesn’t seem to be putting the highest effort into marketing, so I don’t really know what’s up with that. I found out about Book Darts because they’re also retailed through the Field Notes website, who have extremely deliberate branding.
There are maybe two disadvantages to book darts over classic paper rectangles. It does take a minute of patience and a bit of dexterity to figure out how to slip them on and push them all the way down without crinkling the page. But once you learn that little motion, I find it natural. The second disadvantage is that you lose the opportunity to have a tiny bit of art in your life. Paper bookmarks are often beautiful.
If only they had gone just a little bit further… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manicule
Wouldn’t they need to make right- and left-handed manicules unless they went for, like, a hamsa hand?
These metal page makers are great! Another thing in a similar vein are the midori index clips but a little more pricey. They also have a little notch in them, sometimes I will slot a small piece of coloured paper in there so I can visually categorize what the clip is marking.
I will also sometimes mark pages with differently shaped paper clips (also helps with category identification) if I don’t care too much about adding bulk, usually in my notebooks.
These seem nice, but I don’t expect to buy any. Why? Because they don’t seem clearly better than what I currently do, which is dog-ear pages.
Why dog-ear?
I can always dog-ear (don’t have to remember to bring anything with me).
I can’t lose the dog-ear.
Paper is pretty resilient.
I can dog ear the top or bottom corner.
I can dog ear either direction to indicate the page.
I have a record of what pages I dog-eared in the past (and what pages others dog-eared if it’s, say, a library book).
Free.
Obviously I would not dog-ear a rare or antique book, but for almost anything published after, say, 1950, I dog-ear.
you can even indicate an exact line by making a larger or smaller dogear
You MONSTER (just kidding do whatever you want)
Neat, I’ll try it out. $14 is a small price to pay for a shot at a minor ergonomic upgrade.
One thing I like to do is use postcards as bookmarks. They often have nice art and remind me of cool things.
Thing I did not realize: they cost significantly less if you order from the Book Darts website rather than Field Notes.
That said I expect to find this very useful for my current reading, which is largely slowly making my way thru big chunks of Latin, a language that is foreign enough to me that I have to think about where I’m up to.
How do these hold up in backpacks / luggage bags? I’m worried they’d catch on stuff and tear pages more than other bookmarks (that can be pushed totally into the book).
I don’t think I’ve ever had one fall off in a bag! The only time I can recall them falling off/catching is if I start flipping through the book and the page facing the “back” of the dart slips into the tiny fold and pops it off.
It’s possible to make ones with engraving, and to have a more special shape
These seem neat but not obviously meaningfully better for the referenced tasks than a sticky index tab, if running multiples. The darts do look suave though, and I’m sure they last better.
I also recently had need to homebrew some permanent book labels without them, and found that folded over labels from a label maker made a pretty nice and reasonably quick index.
Yeah I’m constantly moving the things around, so adhesives wouldn’t make the cut.
I’ll admit I don’t have much need for optimizing physical bookmarks myself these days, but I expect you’re underestimating how reusable and replaceable an adhesive tag can be. Not that I think it matters; at best it’d be an essentially similar item to what you already use.
I’ve been a long-time user of book darts and highly recommend them.
The one other downside is that if they are on the page and catch on something so that they rotate, the clip can cut into the page edge. This can generally be avoided by making sure you put them all the way to the edge of the page and being aware not to let anything drag along the edge of the pages of a book with darts in it.
Are they easy to lose when they’re not inside a book?
You buy them in quantities of like 50 at a time, and they come in a little tin. So I just keep the tin of them in a drawer, and when I start a new book I stick a dart in it. But they’re also super cheap so I wouldn’t care about losing one.
Thank you!
As always you can find it in Taobao aka Chinese e-commerce website (ChatGPT recommended me to search with 箭头书签夹 [lit. Arrow Bookmark])
https://s.taobao.com/search?ie=utf8&q=箭头书签夹&search_type=item (login required)
I write in the books I read so I just flip to about where I stopped underlining or taking notes.