Writer's bookmarks

I've been reading a delightful article by Jonathan Raban, about the poet and critic William Empson, which includes this description of lunching with him:

In 1971, ten years after first reading Seven Types, I met Empson in London. He’d recently retired from his chair at the University of Sheffield and was living with his wife, Hetta, at Studio House, Hampstead Hill Gardens – in a set-up described by Robert Lowell as a ‘household [that] had a weird, sordid nobility that made other Englishmen seem like a veneer’. Empson’s idea of making lunch was to place an assortment of unpunctured cans of Chinese vegetables on the gas cooker, where they tended to explode. Ancient rashers of fried bacon served as bookmarks in his disintegrating copy of Marvell’s Collected Poems. He stirred his tea with the sole remaining earpiece of his glasses.