Restraint and the use of Post-It notes

John photographed me deep into my task of removing Post-It notes from my many university course books. Notice the markers on my shoe. 

Some of the books and some of the markers. How will I find my favourite passages without the Post-It notes?

Some bright scientist accidentally created the forerunner of Post-It notes in 1968, but the product wasn't widely sold until the early 1980s. That was about a decade after my first go-round at university, so in my campus days, nobody wandered around with books protruding bright-coloured sticky pieces of paper.

I discovered the wonder of these handy little markers when I went back to university in 2014, and perhaps overdid it. By the time I was finished with my copy of Bleak House, it was so full of markers -- top and side -- that it looked like a many-coloured porcupine. People laughed. But Bleak House's 1,000 pages are so stuffed with great characters, quotes and ideas that I couldn't restrain myself.

Faced with a pile of these marker-stuffed books and the necessity of fitting them into bookshelves, I sat down recently and took out all the Post-It notes, one by one, book by book. There were a lot of books, and a lot of markers. It took awhile. This fall, when classes resume, I think I will choose a little more carefully which passages to mark with a bright little piece of paper.