# Somebody invented a better bookmark

This will only be exciting to those of us who still read physical paper books. But like. Guys. They did it. They invented the perfect bookmark.

Classic paper bookmarks fall out easily. You have to put them somewhere while you read the book. And they only tell you that you left off reading somewhere in that particular two-page spread.

Enter the [Book Dart](https://www.bookdarts.com/). It's a tiny piece of metal folded in half with precisely the amount of tension needed to stay on the page. On the front it's pointed, to indicate an exact line of text. On the back, there's a tiny lip of the metal folded up to catch the paper when you want to push it onto a page. It comes in stainless steel, brass or copper.

![](https://39669.cdn.cke-cs.com/rQvD3VnunXZu34m86e5f/images/b49a521b34091185f17e32dd64620143270301a945545bfe.jpg)

They are *so* thin, thinner than a standard cardstock bookmark. I have books with ten of these in them and there's no obvious extra bulk. (They're definitely thicker than those annotation flag stickers, so if you wanted to put several dozen of these in a book you'd run into an issue.) You might think that the amount of tension the metal needs to always stay on the page would be enough that you'd damage the page when putting it on or taking it off, but it's not. I've used over a hundred of these and have never ripped the page.

I think Book Darts are a Pareto improvement for normal fiction book reading. But as a math researcher, I find that they're *way* better for the use-case of marking places in textbooks. If I'm confused about Baire's category theorem, I can look it up in the index, stick a Book Dart in each of the three places it's referenced, and position them to point at the exact lines. I can put the book back on the shelf and they won't shift position, so when I pick up my studying next week I can experience something closer to restoring all the tabs in my browser session.

I'm also the kind of reader that sometimes benefits from having a marker of what line I'm currently reading. On web pages, I'll always scroll such that I'm reading the line that's at the top of the page. With Book Darts, I frequently bump the dart down one paragraph, so that when I go back to reading I won't waste a few seconds scanning for my place. If the page is thin enough, then I can sometimes slide the dart down in real time as I'm reading. They're like having a real-life cursor for everything you're in the middle of reading.

It looks like Book Darts are only produced by this one company, who doesn't seem to be putting the highest effort into marketing, so I don't really know what's up with that. I found out about Book Darts because they're also retailed through the [Field Notes](https://fieldnotesbrand.com/products/tin-o-darts) website, who have extremely deliberate branding.

There are maybe two disadvantages to book darts over classic paper rectangles. It does take a minute of patience and a bit of dexterity to figure out how to slip them on and push them all the way down without crinkling the page. But once you learn that little motion, I find it natural. The second disadvantage is that you lose the opportunity to have a tiny bit of art in your life. Paper bookmarks are often beautiful.