From one book lover to another

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Here’s a story that made my day.

A few months back, I had blogged about a bunch of bookmarks I found at a bargain bookstore. Among those I featured was a beautiful bookmark  featuring some unicorns prancing in the night sky. It was the only one in the tray of bookmarks that wasn’t based on an actual book, and it was smaller than the rest,but I’ve always loved unicorns and I liked the softness of the painting featured in the bookmark.

And then I got a comment from someone in search of that bookmark!

It was a few weeks until my next visit to the bookstore, and when I headed to the counter, I actually panicked because the tray that held the stash of bookmarks was not next to the cash register as it usually was. I asked the staff if they had any more bookmarks, and they pointed me to their school supplies section, and I was a bit dismayed that there weren’t very many left. I rooted around in the tray and breathed a sigh of relief because there was one left — missing the heart ceramic bead, but still, it was the same bookmark (I wanted to swap mine for it, actually, since mine had the bead, but I had inserted it into a greeting card to keep it from getting bent in transit, but realized I wouldn’t be able to pass it off as a greeting card if the bead was poking out, and it was too small for a parcel)!

It only cost P15 (about 30c in USD) and I knew I’d be sending some books for BookMooch sooner or later anyway (in this case it turned out to be later — I had an impossible schedule for several weeks), so I told Alysha I’d send it to her, never mind about the cost. Together with the price of the bookmark, the cost of sending it only came up to around $1 and I could tell how important it was to her, so I was happy to send it along.

Today, weeks later, I was checking on my site when I received a backlink to a blog entry — Alysha’s! She had finally gotten the bookmark, and blogged about it on her site — lookee! A few minutes later I received a personal email from her, too.

Check out the full entry at Alysha’s site — it shows her 1987 bookmark, too!

The bookmark I sent, it turns out, is a version of a bookmark she has loved for over twenty years (whoa! Meanwhile, I’m always losing bookmarks…) and now she has another one almost exactly like it! Yay!

You might think it’s crazy, for me to send something to a stranger across the globe, but well, we actually do it all the time on BookMooch. I recognized the feeling of wanting something so badly — when I was starting my Harry Potter collection, I actually wrote to random moochers in various countries asking them if they had any old Harry Potter international editions lying around, and now I have over a hundred Harry Potter books! Also, when I lost some books to a flood last year, virtual strangers helped me and several other Filipino moochers rebuild our libraries through a special charity set up by some very kind moochers!

I’m glad I stumbled upon the bookmark and had the chance to make someone in another timezone happy. I’m glad Alysha is now enjoying the bookmark — I hope it journeys with her through as many readings as the first one did.

Now, isn’t that a nice story?