What Marks Your Spot? Leslie Budewitz, Bookmarks, and GUILTY AS CINNAMON

SUSAN ELIA MACNEAL: Recently I sent a meme to a friend of mine who's a librarian — maybe you've seen it? It says something along the lines of "Bookmarks are for quitters." While I applaud the sentiment, we mere mortals sometimes have to mark where we are in a given book—whether it's to go to work, make a meal, or get some sleep. 

I have a few bookmarks that I love for sentimental reasons. One's a bookmark with a photograph of Winston Churchill and the quote "Never, never, never give up." There's one from a childhood friend that says "Keep Calm and Eat Cupcakes." And an engraved silver one from my first reading, which was at the Tattered Cover Bookstore in Denver, Co. 

Author Leslie Budewitz, though, has a long and varied history with bookmarks, both comical and poignant. 

Leslie is giving away a copy of her perfect-for-the-holidays new book, GUILTY AS CINNAMON and a tea infuser to one lucky commenter.
 
Take it away, Leslie!

"When I get a little money, I buy books. 

And if there is any left over buy food."

— Deciderius Erasmus

LESLIE BUDEWITZ: Don’t you just love the name Deciderius? What were his parents thinking?

I haven’t even started yet, and I’ve already digressed.

Not long ago, I needed to check a quote from a John Donne poem. (Don’t laugh; these things happen.) I pulled my ragged Norton’s Anthology of English Literature off the shelf and found not just the quote, but an amazing collection of old bookmarks.

I dragged out other volumes, shaking my head at what I discovered. The lost-and-found bookmarks read like a map of Seattle, where I spent most of my twenties and early thirties. A map of departed bookstores, dearly loved: Bailey/Coy Books on Broadway, where I bought the gray paperback editions of Dorothy L. Sayers’ Wimsey books, one at a time. The shop where I found Barbara Pym’s novels, gems of sharp-eyed, sharp-tongued storytelling. Second Story Bookstore in Wallingford, on the second floor of an old grade school. (The café next door was called “Recess,” the menu written on the ancient blackboards.)

The tour brought me back to Montana as well: A memento from Electric Avenue Books, the deeply-missed local bookstore, showing a two-story building with high arched windows. You’d recognize it in a flash on a stroll down our main street. I was surprised at the variety of bookmarks from the last indie in Kalispell, also closed. They changed seasonally, and always included a sketch and a literary quote, like the line from old Deciderius, above. Another, sporting an old roadster, quotes André Gide: “To read a writer is not merely to get an idea of what he says, but to go off with him, and travel in his company.” (Fittingly, I’d tucked that in Making Certain It Goes On: the Collected Poems of Richard Hugo, who often took road trips with friends and students around Montana and wrote poems inspired by the towns—and bars—they visited.)

And why I stuck a bookmark from Partners and Crime in New York in a Mary Oliver volume, I have no idea, but I think it would make the poet smile.

Quite a few of the bookstores still exist. I’ve signed at Seattle Mystery Bookshop several times, as have many of the Reds, and it touched me to find a bookmark from the shop’s early days, not long after Bill Farley opened it. I was a reader then, with no thoughts of writing. Newer versions hang on my office wall, along with bookmarks from other shops where I’ve read or signed.

Sadly, in a volume by e.e. cummings, I found a tasseled book mark bearing the smiling face of a toddler who’d been murdered by his father. His grandmother, a witness in an unrelated case, pressed it into my hands as we sat outside a federal courtroom.

I also found bits torn from envelopes, and a totally unfamiliar scrap of wallpaper. Crumpled maple leaves—remnants of my days at Notre Dame, a campus studded with magnificent trees. Course syllabuses—or syllabi, as Deciderius would probably call them. And in my copy of Montana: A History of Two Centuries, my first business card. Not long after I started my first law firm job, my parents visited. My father asked for my card, and then, eyes twinkling, stuck it in the book he was reading—now on my shelf.

(After I came back to Montana and joined a small law firm in a small town, I was working in our library one day, and found a business card from the long-deceased father of a high school classmate. I hadn’t known he’d once worked there, but of course, I plucked out the card and gave it to her.)

On another shelf, there’s a tottering pile of bookmarks from favorite writers, conferences, and friends. No doubt you have a similar stack. But have you got a reindeer bookmark?

Will someone find one of my bookmarks in a treasured volume some day? I can only hope so.

Reds, do you collect bookmarks? Always use the lovely Italian leather bookmark your brother brought you from Florence? Or mark your place with a candy wrapper or a toothpick?

And don't forget, a book and a tea infuser to one lucky commenter.

GUILTY AS CINNAMON, second in the Spice Shop Mysteries (Berkley Prime Crime, December 1)

Pepper Reece knows that fiery flavors are the spice of life. But when a customer dies of a chili overdose, she finds herself in hot pursuit of a murderer…

Leslie Budewitz is the author of the Food Lovers’ Village Mysteries and the Spice Shop Mysteries—and the first author to win Agatha Awards for both fiction and nonfiction. She fell in love with the Pike Place Market as a college student in Seattle, and still makes regular pilgrimages. The president of Sisters in Crime, she lives in northwest Montana with her husband, a musician and doctor of natural medicine, and their cat Ruff, a cover model and avid bird-watcher. Connect with her through her website and blog, www.LeslieBudewitz.com, or on Facebook, www.Facebook.com/LeslieBudewitzAuthor