Bookmarks (45114)

1) A bookmark is a thin marker, commonly made from paper or leather, used to keep one's place in a printed work and so be able to return to it with ease at some time in the future. more...

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2) This term is being reused in various modern software applications, such as word processors, and most notably, the Internet.

Bookmarks for books

As the first printed books were quite rare and valuable, it was determined early on that something was needed to mark one's place in a book without causing its pages any harm. Some of the earliest bookmarks were used at the end of the sixteenth century, and Queen Elizabeth I was one of the first to own one.

Modern bookmarks are available in a huge variety of materials with a multitude of designs and styles from which to choose.

The first detached, and therefore collectible, bookmarkers began to appear in the 1850s. One of the first references to these is found in Mary Russell Mitford's Recollections of a Literary Life (1852): "I had no marker and the richly bound volume closed as if instinctively." Note the abbreviation of 'bookmarker' to 'marker'. The modern abbreviation is usually 'bookmark'.

By the 1860s attractive machine-woven markers were being manufactured, mainly in Coventry, the centre of the silk-ribbon industry. One of the earliest was produced by J.&J. Cash to mark the death of the Prince Consort in 1861. Thomas Stevens of Coventry soon became pre-eminent in the field and claimed to have nine hundred different designs.

Bookmarks produced by Thomas Stevens are called Stevengraphs. Stevengraphs first appeared around 1862. Woven silk bookmarks were very appreciated gifts in Victorian days and Stevens seemed to make one for every occasion and celebration. One Stevengraph read: All of the gifts which haven bestows, there is one above all measure, and that's a friend midst all our woes, a friend is a found treasure to thee I give that sacred name, for thou art such to me, and ever proudly will I claim to be a friend to thee.

Most nineteenth-century bookmarks were intended for use in bibles and prayer books and were made of ribbon or woven silk. By the 1880s the production of woven silk markers was declining and printed markers made of stiff paper or card began to appear in significant numbers. This development paralleled the wider availability of books themselves, and the range of available bookmarkers soon expanded dramatically.

Internet bookmarks

Bookmarks are pointers – primarily to URLs – built-in to the various Internet web browsers. Bookmarks have been incorporated into almost every browser since the Mosaic browser and are normally stored on the software client. A folder metaphor may be used for organization. Various shareware utilities and server-side web utilities have been developed to better manage bookmarks, yet none has gained widespread acceptance.

Read more at Wikipedia.org