The Beauty of all things Bookish

Here's an interesting website devoted to exhibiting the art of the bookmark. It's quite interesting to look at the historical ones from the Victorian and Art Nouveau eras. (My personal favourite bookmarks however, are the ones that Persephone Books provides with everyone of their books. They represent the fabric reproduced on the book's endpapers - a fabric from either the time in which the book was published or set in.) And the Guardian picks their top ten most beautiful bookshops around the world here. Out of their list, I've only been to Hatchards in London. My pick for most beautiful? Well, one of them would surely have to be the bookstore on the first floor of Salts Mill in Saltaire, Yorkshire. The textile mill was originally built in 1853 and restored only fairly recently. The artist David Hockney has a gallery on an upper floor and there is an excellent cafe as well as lots of other shops. The town (which my grandparents used to live in - I have ancestors who used to work in the mill) is a UNESCO World Heritage Site for its preservation of how a Victorian mill town would have looked, and is well worth a stop if one is in the area - on the way to Haworth, for example.