A bookmark that happens to be a photograph

A book, open flat, drawn in fine engraved lines with the pages shown only as ruled hatching. A photograph is pressed between two of them, its edge sticking out past where the pages end. A ribbon marker hangs from the spine, further down than the book itself.

Whoever closed the book on this photograph was marking a page and keeping a photograph at the same time. It's rarely a coincidence which page.

What's actually printed here?

A book, a photograph and a marker, all doing double duty.

The book is drawn as an engraving would render one — outline and fine parallel hatching, no text set on the page — open to the point where a photograph lies flat between the two halves, protruding a little past the trimmed edge of the pages themselves. A ribbon marker runs down from the top of the spine and past the bottom of the book, further than the pages go, the way a ribbon does when the book it's sewn into is thinner than the ribbon is long.

Why does a book flatten a photograph better than almost anything else?

Because the pressure is even, and it never lets up.

A photograph folded in a wallet takes a crease exactly where it bends, over and over, until the paper cracks along that one line. A photograph pressed inside a closed book takes pressure across its whole surface instead, spread evenly by the weight of every page above it, with nothing folding and nothing rubbing against leather or coins the way a carried photograph does. Books left shut on a shelf apply that pressure for years without anyone doing anything — which is exactly why a photograph slipped into one so often turns up decades later still flat, when almost nothing else kept loose in a drawer over the same stretch of time would have survived that well.

Which page should it be pressed at?

Whichever one the book was already open to when somebody decided to keep it there.

Sometimes that's a page that means something on its own — a family record page at the front of an old book, a passage read at a particular service, a chapter somebody was partway through when the photograph first went in. Sometimes it's just wherever the book happened to fall open, and the photograph became the reason it kept falling open there afterwards. Both are the actual place a real photograph like this would be found, which is the useful thing to know if you're deciding where a printed version marks its page: the choice doesn't need a reason attached to it any more than the original one did.

Do you need permission to print your own book and photograph?

Not for a photograph that's yours, pressed inside a book you own. Neither the photograph nor the plain, undecorated pages of a generic book carry anybody else's design to clear — there's no cover art, no publisher's typesetting, nothing drawn here beyond ruled lines standing in for pages. If the book itself has an identifiable jacket design or a well-known typographic cover you wanted to reproduce exactly, that's a separate question, but the pressed-photograph idea itself needs nothing more than the same permission every rights question on this site comes down to.

Does this work for a book other than one with religious pages?

Yes — any book kept long enough to become furniture works the same way.

A dictionary that sat on the same shelf for thirty years. A hymnal. A favourite novel reread often enough that it stayed permanently open to roughly the same place. What matters isn't which book; it's that a photograph tucked into a book somebody actually kept and returned to is a different object from a photograph tucked into a random drawer — it's been looked after by the relative who never threw anything away, on purpose, for as long as the book itself has been kept.

Doesn't keeping a photograph in a book damage the book?

Less than most other ways of storing one does.

A photograph pressed flat between two pages, image side against paper rather than against another photograph's emulsion, sits there the way a pressed flower does — protected, not damaged, and doing no harm to the pages either as long as it isn't left somewhere damp. What actually shortens a book's life is the opposite problem: a spine forced to sit slightly open for years around something too thick for it, which is why the photograph protruding a little past the trimmed edge here, rather than being buried deep inside, is the more accurate version of how this usually turns out. A gift built from a real family photograph carries the same logic — what a photo gift needs to survive being looked at more than once is exactly this kind of ordinary, undramatic care.

Does it print well?

Yes, and the engraved-line treatment is what makes it work.

Fine parallel hatching survives fabric better than a filled illustration would, because the lines stay distinct rather than merging into a grey block once they're printed at chest or back size. A single warm metallic-reading ink for the photograph and the ribbon, against black for the book itself, is enough — two colours doing the whole job, in keeping with a short palette printing better than a full one. Cream, bone and a pale sand all let the gold read as gold rather than fighting it for warmth.

How do I get one made?

Describe the book at JustOG — how far the photograph protrudes past the page, how long the ribbon runs, which page it's marking. Pick a direction, drag the crop frame, see it composited on the real garment, and it's made to order and shipped.

Designs other people have published are in the shop.

The ribbon still finds the same page every time the book is opened.