Save the Whales Bookmarks and Whale Book Speed Reviews

It's time once again for Book Phantom to return her library books, which means another bookmarking caper!  This month, I bought my bookmarks from Save the Whales, and proceeds go to protect these intelligent and graceful giants.  I won't publish the bookmark fronts on my blog due to copyright, but here's the link so you can order some yourselves (the bookmarks are at the bottom of the link page).  There are eight different whale designs to choose from, and at only fifty cents each, you can order them all for less than a cup of Starbucks or a bargain paperback.  Below are the messages I left on the backs of the bookmarks for unsuspecting book borrowers.


Gray Whale Bookmark for Grayson.  It's a memoir, so the quote about time and memory seems proper.



Sperm Whale bookmark for Moby Dick.  I'm placing this in Chapter 32: Cetology, where Melville debates whether a whale is a fish or a mammal.




North Atlantic Right Whale bookmark for Galore.  This mark is just right for a story set in the North Atlantic island of Newfoundland.  The story begins with the removal of a man from a beached whale. 

Although I don't promote my blog by placing bookmarks into children's books I borrow, I'm putting my Save the Whales sticker (a lagnaippe that came with my bookmark purchase) into Nightbirds on Nantucket.  Just a little surprise for one of the younger readers out there.

Greetings from Low-Country Georgia! Postcard Bookmarks

It’s time once again for the Book Phantom to return her library books.  Wise Blood by Flannery O’Connor will go back with a postcard bookmark of Forsyth Park in Savannah, Georgia.  Savannah was O’Connor’s birthplace, and although I have a postcard from her childhood home, it was too large to fit into the paperback copy I borrowed.  To add meaning to my postcard bookmark, I put a snippet of my historic Savannah map on the back of the postcard with O’Connor’s home on Charlton Street
circled in red.  Because the front depicts the Forsyth Park fountain, I slipped the card into Chapter 5, where Enoch enters the gates of City Forest Park to ogle female swimmers and insult animals at the zoo.

Forsyth Park Postcard Bookmark for Wise Blood

Savannah Breeze by Mary Kay Andrews is also due.  BeBe, the heroine in the novel, is a well-to-do business woman who is swindled by her conman boyfriend.  All she has left in the aftermath of this affair is the run-down Breeze Inn on Tybee Island and a few good friends to help her fix up the property.  These same friends help her get her money back from the villain, and they serve up his just desserts.  Savannah Breeze gets a Tybee Island postcard depicting an aerial view of the pier and coastline.  On the back I added a clip from a Tybee Island map.  (Note: I didn’t post the fronts of the postcards as they are protected by copyright.)

Tybee Island Postcard Bookmark for Savannah Breeze

Here’s hoping the next readers enjoy this taste of low-country Georgia!

Weird Sisters Bookmark

The Weird Sisters? (bookmark front)

The Book Phantom is wrapping up her “Fun with Shakespeare” reading experience.  Now it’s time to “close the book” on this reading module by sneaking a bookmark into my library book returns (did you know Shakespeare coined the term "to sneak"?).  It all started with Eleanor Brown’s new release The Weird Sisters (the title is a reference to the three witches in Shakespeare’s Macbeth).  The front of my bookmark is a vintage photograph of three wizened old gals.  It came from an old family album, but no one knows for sure who they are.  I call them the Weird Sisters because they look like they could stir up some “toil and trouble”. 

On the back of these Weird Sisters, I put a copy of the first scene from Macbeth, where the three witches meet and say the famous line: “Fair is foul, and foul is fair,” before taking off.

Act I Scene I from Macbeth (bookmark back)

In case anyone is interested in the titles from “Fun with Shakespeare”, I've included some "speed reviews":

Room Inspired Bookmark

Today I’m going to release my copy of Room by Emma Donoghue into the librosphere.  On page 85, the author describes the garden shed that Old Nick, the kidnapper, transformed into Ma's prison.  I made this bookmark from a paint chip I collected during my junk-room-to-home-office renovation.  Eerily, the hue is called Garden Shed.  I typed parts of the description on the front.  On the back, I made reference to the title and author, as well as the eggshell snake that Jack made and kept under the bed.  It was a fill-in-the-blanks operation, my little homage to Donoghue’s story.  I plan on placing the book (bookmarked at page 85, of course) somewhere an unsuspecting reader can find it.  I think I’ll leave it in some sort of room – a rest room, or maybe a dressing room in a store.  If you find it and make your way to the Book Phantom, please leave a comment!



Front side



Back side

The Book Phantom Strikes Again

Today, my library copy of The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet is due.  I will return it, as I await a copy of my very own from Amazon.  As you know, I like to sneak little mementos into books I release back out into the librosphere (tee-hee).  Here is what I made for The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet:

It’s a bookmark which I crafted with my own two little hands, sort of like those Artist Trading Cards people like to exchange.  It's a trifle, but I hope it brightens someone’s day.  Perhaps it will prompt that random reader to ask, “Hey, where’d this come from?” or “What kind of loony would make such a thing?” 

Pretty sneaky, sis!  Feel free to enjoy it yourself...