About bookends

Their purpose? To keep your books upright. Their use started in Europe in the late-16th century when books were produced in enough quantities to be stored vertically on bookshelves. Previously, not many people had books and those who did had very few, so these were just stacked on top of one another on tables and other flat surfaces. By the 1870s, bookends had become household objects.

You would think that bookends are just practical pieces of wood, metal or plastic but they're not! Collectorsweekly.com describes them as "punctuation marks on a shelf, proclaiming the importance their owners place on the tomes in between." People actually collect them and there's even a Collector's Encyclopedia of Bookends.  Antique and vintage bookends are being auctioned on eBay for hundreds of dollars (American). There's certainly more to bookends if a library, the Mosman Library in Sydney, Australia, felt it fit to hold an exhibition, 'Bookends: Another Chapter', in April-May 2011.

Here's a sampling of interesting bookends I googled:

Glass bowls that do more than just keep fish.

You can, of course, use real books.

For comic-buffs.

Vintage bookends.

If you like making things, you might want to try turning old vinyl records into cool bookends:

Items around the house also make attractive bookends and you don't have to spend an extra cent for them.

I don't own any special bookends. I use the types you can buy at a stationery shop. Often, I would just stack the last few books horizontally, thus keeping the other books on the shelf upright. The only special pair of bookends I have are a pair of brass horses' heads given by a close friend.