book darts

It’s a happy day whenever a new supply of Book Darts arrives in my letterbox.

I’m a Book Darts addict. Gone are the days of slapping post-its throughout my books and making them all end up looking like this poor copy of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, which also had the unfortunate experience of weathering a spilled glass of water on its second day of liberation from a pristine bookstore.

Book Darts are reusable metal arrows you can slide onto the edge of a page. They’re of archival quality and don’t mark the page at all.

You can use a single Book Dart to take you through a whole novel, like the one currently keeping me company in Juan Carlos Onetti’s A Brief Life. Book Darts don’t fall out and allow you to open a book exactly at the line where you last stopped reading. Perfect.

I’ve also used hundreds of Book Darts to mark ideas I need to revisit. My recent experience reading Syd Field’s Screenplay would have been incomplete without a pencil and a tin of Book Darts in hand.

This is how neat the side of Screenplay looks, helping me get back to the most useful parts of the book as fast as possible.

Book Darts were created by Bob and Jeanette Williams from Oregon in the United States and were originally made in a basement using five separate hand operations and three tools. Now they’re made in a high speed press.

Here is a special note from the Book Darts team:

Dear Fellow Reader,

Reputable studies show conclusively that multitasking (such as we do when surfing the web or, for me, even getting ready to leave the house) is both less efficient and less effective. It takes more time than if sequential, and we do each task less well.

When habitual, our plastic brains actually change physically and become less capable of sustained attention (of concentration).

Nich. Carr in his excellent book, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brain argues further that the legacy of 500 years of movable type — widespread solitary reading and resultant pondering (“Deep reading makes deep thinking,” he says) — is in danger of becoming severely degraded.

Just look at what passes for thoughtful argument; it seems worse every year. The antidote is better reading and, hence, better thinking. Trying harder to be conscious of the need to slow down and concentrate is your part. Making it more likely we will read and think better through targeted re-reading is our realm.

If you tell a bookstore about us, remind them we are a form of reading insurance, but unlike other insurance, we actually prevent loss. “If you have ever read something authentic or useful that needs saving, we can help make sure you can find it again, with no harm to the page.” GOOD READING MAKES GOOD THINKING.

You can buy this brilliant reading insurance directly from the manufacturer here. The darts come in different quantities, like these tins of 100 and 125.

If you’d like to try a few Book Darts first, the folks over at Book Darts have kindly sent me 35 of these samples to give away.

Just drop me an email with your name and postal address and I’ll put a sample in the post for you.