Bookmarks of Every Kind

Strip of Bacon About the Most Unique
That Des Moines Librarian Has Yet Found.

The most startling marker that Forest B. Spaulding, public librarian of Des Moines, Iowa, has come across in the books that have circulated from the library was a strip of underdone bacon. The most ordinary bookmark found in the books is the common variety of wire hairpin. Hairpins might be collected by the hundreds, Mr. Spaulding says, but owing to that very fact they are considered as fairly worthless from the collector's standpoint.

The vacation season is announced annually by the presence of snapshots in the returned books. These are both personal or otherwise in character. Postcards and letters, too, come in often. Frequently letters addressed and stamped are found just as they were left by the book's borrower who doubtless was proceeding post office-ward by way of the library. These are mailed from the library.

Mr. Spaulding has noticed any number of pretty girls sitting on the beach at Riverview Park with books, and he has been looking forward all summer to recovering a bathing suit absentmindedly left by one of the young ladies in her book.

--Newport Mercury, Newport, Rhode Island, January 3, 1920, page 3.