Ephemera

A bus ticket, a grocery list, a torn scrap of foil folded like a leaf—each time we opened a beloved book, something slipped out, something placed there long ago. None of them were real bookmarks, but all of them were true ones: a fragment of a day, caught between sentences.

We began photographing them this summer: thread and twine, receipts, ribbons, a feather, a twist of wire. Each object marked a pause in our reading lives, an interruption we never meant to preserve. They became small archives of attention—proof that we once stopped, thought, turned away.

Looking through them now, we can almost see our younger selves: Finch dog-earing a field guide to birds; Bluebird folding a transit map to save a line from Didion. The marks we leave are not always elegant, but they are honest.

This post gathers those images: not just as curiosities, but as quiet portraits of time. The books change, the world changes, but somewhere between their pages, a piece of the day remains.