A periodical problem

However, quite typically, what nettled the men most was the occasional filching of a centrespread from one of the 8220;adult8221; magazines 8212; before they had had a chance to see it, or rather feast their eyes on it! Their self-righteous indignation was amusingly insightful, to say the least. It prompted the organiser to shoot off, post-haste, a tactfully worded circular: 8220;Will the member who has retained the missing centrespread 8212; no doubt unintentionally 8212; kindly return it? After everyone has seen it, he can have it for keeps,8221; Presto, within a day, the pilfered picture would be back in circulation. And the culprit would remain safely anonymous.

On the other hand, what irked the womenfolk was the recipe or discount-coupon lifter whose handiwork was a yawning, neatly slit rectangle in one of the pages of a women8217;s magazine. There were two possibilities. Either a housewife had decided to try out a new recipe 8212; with her unsuspecting family as the guinea pigs, as some observed uncharitably. Or she wasgoing to cash in on a discount sale 8212; and probably impoverish her husband in the process! Or sometimes a teenager would hijack a blow-up of his favourite filmstar or cricketer to adorn the walls of his room, raising the hackles of the others.

Occasionally extempore wit did surface. Once after reading a piece advocating the abolition of corporal punishment in schools, a dissident jocularly scrawled in a corner of the page: 8220;I still firmly believe that a pat on the back administered hard enough, often enough and low enough develops character!8221; The member who got the magazine next pencilled a tart rejoinder below: 8220;Please stop scribbling in the magazine 8212; or we8217;ll have to give you a dose of your own medicine!8221;

There were other irritants as well 8212; badly mutilated magazines that appeared to have survived a tug-of-war between kids; magazines that had doubled as fly-swatters, sometimes with a fly plastered to the cover as proof of the wielder8217;s prowess; dog-eared dailies embellished with children8217;sdoodles; half-completed crosswords, abandoned in frustration, pockmarked with unsightly deletions and overwriting; and 8220;word power8221; features blithely ticked by vocabulary-builders, often indicating exaggeratedly high ratings! However, the library members good-naturedly tolerated all this.

They also stoically put up with that all-too-common human failing 8212; forgetfulness. Like the time a member forgot to return an 8220;adult8221; magazine even after a month had passed. When he eventually did return it, he attached a cryptic but candid note: 8220;Sorry for the delay 8212; I slept over this!8221; Discreet enquiries revealed that he indeed had 8212; quite literally. For in order to keep the well-spiced magazine away from his children, he had hidden it under his bed 8212; and forgotten all about it!