In particular, the boy loved to deface filmstars in film magazines. As a result, comely heroines grinned toothlessly (their ivories having been blacked out) or leered from behind fierce-looking moustaches. Handsome heroes were rendered cross-eyed, pot-bellied and generally cretinous. And venerable old thespians were made to look positively ghoulish with Dracula-like fangs and bloodshot eyes! However, the library members tolerated all these pranks. And some of them, young at heart like yours truly, even secretly admired the talentedlad.

However, quite typically, what nettled the men most was the occasional filching of a centrespread from one of the ``adult'' magazines -- 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: ``Will the member who has retained the missing centrespread -- no doubt unintentionally -- kindly return it? After everyone has seen it, he can have it for keeps,'' 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 women's magazine. There were two possibilities. Either a housewife had decided to try out a new recipe -- with her unsuspecting family as the guinea pigs, as some observed uncharitably. Or she wasgoing to cash in on a discount sale -- 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: ``I still firmly believe that a pat on the back administered hard enough, often enough and low enough develops character!'' The member who got the magazine next pencilled a tart rejoinder below: ``Please stop scribbling in the magazine -- or we'll have to give you a dose of your own medicine!''

There were other irritants as well -- 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 wielder's prowess; dog-eared dailies embellished with children'sdoodles; half-completed crosswords, abandoned in frustration, pockmarked with unsightly deletions and overwriting; and ``word power'' 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 -- forgetfulness. Like the time a member forgot to return an ``adult'' magazine even after a month had passed. When he eventually did return it, he attached a cryptic but candid note: ``Sorry for the delay -- I slept over this!'' Discreet enquiries revealed that he indeed had -- quite literally. For in order to keep the well-spiced magazine away from his children, he had hidden it under his bed -- and forgotten all about it!