When I was a Saturday girl at the local library, I found some pretty bizarre bookmarks, most notably a rasher of (raw) bacon. I never need to get to this level, as I have literally dozens of bookmarks to use.
I buy many of my books second-hand, and from time to time select some to pass on to further owners. I love it when something from a previous owner turns up in the book! I have a set of mid-nineteenth century editions of the works of ‘Hippocrates’ owned by a Cambridge classicist, Arthur Peck, who used all sorts of scraps of paper as bookmarks, including pages from booksellers’ catalogues, invitations to dinner and to concerts, and mysterious notes about meetings. There’s even a note about how ‘U.R’ “said he’d like to talk to me about the chapel and my failure to attend it”.
Today, something turned up in a copy of Fermat’s Last Theorem and it’s so lovely I have to share it. Some basic online searching reveals that the nun who wrote it died just a couple of years ago, but I have obscured her convent and her name here, as I don’t know how she’d feel about it being made public. She thanks her correspondents for sending her their “Saturday winnings” and offers them six numbers for the lottery; plus a possible substitute from “Mother Perpetua, now dead” who was “a great one for the turf!!”
I wish I’d met the author; she sounds like such fun.
The retiring academic 