The Mighty Bookdart | Edward A. Dougherty
Recently, I was pulled aside during a security screening at the airport so they could go through my carry on, which had my books, journal, and fountain pens. “While we search your bag, sir,” I was told, quite firmly, “please do not reach for your things.” It was simultaneously polite and threatening. They opened everything, until they flipped through my copy of Sam Hamill’s translation of Basho’s travel writings—we were heading to Japan, after all—and found a sleeve with a line of Bookdarts running down the side. The officer slackened visibly at the discovery. “Going through the x-ray machine,” he said, “they must have looked like bullets.”
I considered preaching to him that there are things mightier than the sword and exhorting him to order himself a tin, but thought better of it. I know the limits of my own obsessions.
Shaped like small arrowheads, Bookdarts are a flat paper clip, metal sticky notes, mental responses made physical, nonverbal marginalia. Simple but elegantly ingenious, they slip on the edge of a page to point at a specific line, but they don’t wrinkle or discolor the paper, don’t flap outside the book as if you’ve been reading during a ticker tape parade, and they’re reusable. I buy them by the hundred, and when I refill the round tins I have by my reading chair and by the bed they make a satisfying little clink.
Some liken my relationship to Bookdarts to a newly converted devotee. That’s only because I don’t want to merely recommend these little metal clips as a handy product to buy: I want to praise them. To all who notice them in my books, I explain their many benefits. To the truly curious, I give them as gifts. My students roll their eyes when one of the uninitiated asks about the shiny line markers in my textbook. “I haven’t told you about Bookdarts?” I exclaim, shocked at my oversight.
I used to write in books, but when I’d re-read them, my eye gravitated to those bits I underlined or commented on. Also, my youthful understandings and musings scribbled in margins were, well, immature, that annoying mix of know-it-all and ignorance.
Returning recently to formative readings from my teens and twenties, some concepts were so familiar that I want to exclaim, “That’s exactly what I think!” Ideas I thought I discovered are right there in black and white. The shock of recognition is almost electric. I now realize these writers expressed thoughts that had gradually became my own blood and breath, and now encountering them again reveals just how much progress I’ve made. It’s remarkable, how influential good writing can be. Really absorbing books can be powerful, both personally and socially. They become means of integrated living, models for possibilities, comfort in trials, wisdom for the search, and delight in beauty. It is a force I want to tap into as fully as I can, and for me Bookdarts help. I attend to this process like an acolyte.
As I read, if a passage moves me, I mark it with a Bookdart. If a phrase causes me to look up thoughtfully or amaze me with daring language, I slip a Bookdart on. What I’m obsessed with is that thin place, where the literary world brushes up against the world of my soul.
Later, when done with the text, I flip through, enjoying those marked lines again, allowing the original idea to well up from memory. If the point or the writing is still striking, I copy it out; I write these passages by hand, allowing the writer’s words pass right through me again. I’ve filled binders with these notes, in a process I call “scribing,” as if I were a monk in my private scriptorium. After I’ve copied the words, I slide the Bookdart off the page (sometimes it squeaks delightfully) and drop it back in a tin, where it waits, ready for the next volume.