The Rewinding Bookmark

The Rewinding Bookmark is a strip of dark green silk with a small spool at its head and a clockwork movement roughly the size of a lentil. Closing the book winds it. At some point in the small hours it turns itself back through three pages and then goes still. There is no battery, no app and no screen, and the only sound it makes is a single click that you will hear once, at night, and blame on the radiator.

Nobody asked for this. What readers ask for is the exact opposite: a bookmark that holds a place precisely, does not slide, and does not fall out when the book is picked up by the wrong end. This one moves your place backwards on purpose, by a fixed amount, every single night. The manual calls that a feature, in a typeface small enough to suggest the makers know how it sounds.

The use-case, though, is oddly convincing. Consider the last three pages you read before falling asleep. You did not really read them. Your eyes went along the lines while the rest of you was already elsewhere, and in the morning the story has a small hole in it that you patch by guessing. The bookmark simply returns you to the last thing you genuinely took in. People who read in bed report finishing books they had previously abandoned twice.

One owner has been working through a dense history of canal engineering since March, advancing about five pages a night and losing three. She calls it the slowest possible way to read a book and the only way she has ever enjoyed one. The manufacturer now prints the ratio on the box, five forward and three back, in the manner of a fuel economy figure.