My very favourite invention

People who know me will not be surprised when I say that this is a corner of my living room:

I REALLY love books. I devour them, inhale them, delight in them, wallow in them. My mother says that I was bored until I learnt to read, and she should know, because my mother is exactly the same. There were always books in the house when I was growing up and that didn’t change when my mum met Douglas and we eventually moved into his house. We brought furniture and books, books, books with us. Douglas too liked to read, mostly science fiction (there’s a surprise!), chortling away to Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams, or else frowning at the business pages of the newspaper. Here’s a gratuitous picture of him reading the paper, just because:

My mum’s favourite place to read is in the bath. She has a bath every night, and often takes a book with her, propping it on one of those racks that you can hang across the bath to put the soap in. She used to wedge the pages open with a towel and the inevitable often happened, as the towel wouldn’t lie quite right, the book would wobble and take a plunge into the water, afterwards ending up sitting in the airing cupboard with wrinkly pages to dry out. It was only a matter of time before Douglas spotted the problem and started thinking that something could be done. He experimented with different ideas until, in 1995, the year that photo above was taken, he came up with this:

After a few dinner table discussions, we decided to call it a Bookminda, and it does just that, holding your book open so you don’t have to. Here it is in real life:

Made of aluminium, it has a coating that can be made any colour, or in contrasting colours. The arms, which are strangely lovely to touch because of the shape, are held tightly to the body so that they can be set in any position, but loosely enough that you can adjust them. Adjustable is important, and is something that most book holders on the market don’t do. It’s important because sometimes people like us read books like this:

From the beginning… to the end:

so the Bookminda needs to be able to adjust to the different thicknesses of the different stages of fat books, as well as thin books, magazines etc. The arms, as Douglas noted in the sketch above, are non-slip rubber, meaning the pages don’t slide through or pop out, even at page 628. I use mine all the time, including whilst cooking:

and studying:

Of all the things that Douglas has made over the years, it is the one idea that has become an integral part of my everyday life. Everyone I have ever showed it to who likes to read has instantly wanted one. So, did it sell? Well…

Douglas did sell some. He sold some to QPD. Do you remember QPD? Quality Paperbacks Direct, they were a book catalogue that often turned up in the back pages of the weekend papers. (They are difficult to find on the internet these days as they have largely disappeared.) He also sold some to Waterstones, in their corporate dark blue. However, despite it clearly being a really, really good idea, Douglas came up against the very typical British corporate attitude to new ideas of any kind: fear of the unknown. I remember him coming home one evening to describe a conversation with a company to whom he had sent a sample of the Bookminda. ‘They asked me if it had a track record.’ A track record? It’s a new product! New products don’t have track records! We were indignant. The company, obviously, said no, because they only took a risk on products that had a clear history of sales. In hindsight, I wonder if Douglas’s somewhat maverick approach to sales (of which more in another post) may have put them off, but I can’t shake the idea that actually, for all we really love the idea of being a nation of innovators, we are, in reality, pretty conservative. When I emailed someone at the Institute of Patentees and Inventors about this project, he said that my book was vital ‘because Britain needs waking up to the importance of innovation and invention.’ It’s sometimes difficult for me to step back and see if my frustration that this wonderful idea of Douglas’s didn’t sell is because he was important to me or because it was, and is, a genuinely good idea, but then I remember what I was writing about when it comes to patents, combined with comments like this, and I have to come back to the conclusion that actually, as a country, we’re not that up for new things. Anyway, that’s for another time. Today I’ll end with a clipping showing the only photo I can find of Douglas with the Bookminda together (as well as a bonus Spectangle! I recognise the plate, so the photo was clearly taken in his workshop), from an article in The Times about the London International Inventors Fair of 1997. Note the tone of the article; that balance, once again, between trying not to laugh, and taking the ideas seriously. At least the journalist took more time to understand than the company that turned down a new idea because of its lack of track record.

Tags: books, Britain, design, Inventions