Pretty Good on Paper

When I was in graduate school I used to use lots of sticky notes to mark passages of books I was reading.  These would look pretty ugly after being taken around campus in a book bag and crunched up on shelves and such.  Then somebody invented tape flags, which didn’t look quite as bad after some use, but could (like the sicky notes) tear a book when you remove them.  When they lose their stickyness they sometimes get accidentally pulled out.  And they did get bent and creased after a while, too.   And sometimes the sticky stuff gets on the pages of the book.

For a few years now I have mostly used page corners that I have made myself, old-school origami style, or the corners of envelopes, which you just cut off.  Downside to the former is that they are a pain in the neck to fold.  Downside to the latter is that they are only infrequently attractive, and I don’t get as much snail-mail as I used to.  Additionally, it is hard to remember which page you intended to mark.  Is it the front of the corner, or the back?

So today I give you the sticky-note page corner, a wicked genetic hybrid of the two that solves all of your bookmarking needs.

Start with a square sticky note. 

Stick it to a flat surface and fold it in half from the bottom so it looks like this.

Then fold it side to side the other way.

And unfold it and flip it over so it is sticky-side up.

Then fold it corner to corner.

Then corner to remaining corner so it looks like this.

Then stick it together so that is looks like this.

And then this.

As you can see, the sticky parts hold together so that one side flaps open when you open the book. 

This is the page that you are marking. 

And doesn’t that look better than the sticky notes shown here?  It can’t get bent out of shape or creased, or accidentally pulled out, because it is right there in line with the pages of the book.

If you wish, you can emphasize the page that it marks by making another crease or two, which gives you a little arrow, like so.

Isn’t that better?