The silken bookmark

When my father was a boy in Gloucestershire during the war, he was taken into Bristol one day to visit a bookshop and choose a book for his birthday. He selected a small edition of The Wind in the Willows with a pale green silk ribbon bookmark. The following day the bookshop was firebombed and all the stock was destroyed. So my father’s choice had rescued this book.  

This precious object was passed on to me and my sister as children, and I loved it for the fate it had escaped and the exquisite detail of the bookmark, the like of which I had never seen before. To my sorrow, from all its use, eventually the bookmark wore through and was lost. 

Macmillan Collector’s Library has now published an anthology of classic children’s stories that I edited. It has a ribbon bookmark in exactly the shade of pale green that I remember from my father’s book. And it also contains a story by Kenneth Grahame.