The Rewinding Bookmark

The Rewinding Bookmark is a length of dark green silk ribbon with a small brass key charm at its head and, hidden inside the charm, 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 exactly how it sounds.

The use, though, is oddly convincing. Consider the last three pages you read before falling asleep under the lamp. 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.

Testing turned up one unexpected problem: cats. A cat asleep on the desk behind an open book will, sooner or later, notice a ribbon moving by itself in the middle of the night. Several early models were found in the morning halfway across the room, still clicking, with the book three pages back and the cat pretending to be asleep. The makers added a heavier charm, and the cats, so far, have accepted the compromise.

The real thing behind the joke is how little of our tired reading actually sticks. Nearly everyone has turned a page and realised they cannot remember a word of it, and nearly everyone has kept going anyway, out of politeness to the book. The bookmark simply refuses to be polite. It assumes that half-asleep reading does not count, and quietly gives you another go at the pages you only pretended to read.

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.