Bookmark Collector

Deanna Dahlsad has started a series of articles that follow up on her discussion of the personal collection as museum. In Curator of Your Own Museum: Part One, she takes the U.S. Department of Labor’s definition of a curator and breaks it down into three steps of collecting. For a bookmark collector:

1. Acquisition: which is pretty straight forward. We each have our own criteria for acquiring new bookmarks for our collections. Sometimes it’s just happenstance (hey, there’s a bookmark. And it’s free!), and sometimes we buy or bid on an item that fits our preferred category (I don’t yet have that 1934 World’s Fair bookmark on eBay).
2. Storage and Display: whether we are stuffing them into shoe boxes or placing them into archival envelopes with cotton gloves, we store those bookmarks somewhere. Displaying them is just as varied: binders, frames, books, backing boards and ribbon, etc.
3. Exhibition and Education: this is a further step not everyone has taken. I know many collectors have displayed their bookmarks at libraries and community centers. I’ve learned a lot about my bookmarks from websites and newsletters. I suppose this blog is my first attempt at both exhibition and education.

I’m really enjoying Deanna’s articles about collecting and collections, and how this fits into a larger picture of historical merit.