70-Year-Old Cigarette Ash

Browsing through the library of a camp on Shuswap Lake several summers ago, I came upon a 1943 edition of John P. Marquand's "So Little Time," a Marquand novel I hadn't read.  The camp director was persuaded to sell me the book, along with a collection of Dorothy Parker's poems, and I brought it back to Vancouver and set it on a shelf with other Marquands.

Finally, now having plenty of time,  I pulled "So Little Time" from its place between "B.F.'s Daughter" and "Point of No Return," and began to read.  There were no surprises in the style--it's vintage Marquand--but what did surprise me, what I found more evocative--were traces of cigarette ash caught here and there along the spine.

The book was published in 1943, and showed no signs of having been read since then.  I began wondering about the smoker who had enjoyed this novel almost seventy years ago.  An artist friend had given me another novel, "People of the Book" by Geraldine Brooks, in which a book conservator finds elusive and tantalizing clues--a fragment of a butterfly's wing, wine and blood stains--in a rare and ancient volume.  There is slim chance of ever finding the people of the book, or the cigarette smoking reader of "So Little Time," but it does engage one's curiosity (as did the Chinese writing I found the other day in a library copy of Harold Bloom's "Hamlet: Poem Unlimited"). 

As many people have, I have pressed flowers and leaves in books, and am pleased when I find, for example, a sprig of still bright yellow forsythia from a house where we once lived.  So perhaps I will leave some unexplained souvenirs in my books.

Meanwhile, I go back to pondering the identity of the person behind the 70-year-old cigarette ash.  I thought at first I should brush the ash away; now I think I should leave it where it is.