Leaving a chocolate thumbprint in a New Yorker cartoon book

There comes a time in most people's lives — after dinner, to be precise — when we find ourselves wandering through a Barnes and Noble in suburban Boston, waiting around for a friend who is feeling sick to his stomach with an undisclosed ailment. At some point, the friend will emerge from the bookstore's mercifully accessible bathroom, feeling somewhat less sick to his stomach.

In the meantime, you have to browse.

There are many books available for the browsing. But there's no point in picking up something substantial — what can you comprehend in an indeterminate amount of waiting-around time? Probably something like this:

1) ... Bayonets! Bayonets and dirt were everywhere! Digging through the blood-filled trenches in the once-idyllic fields of Flanders, Doughboys and GIs alike wallowed in the shell-buffeted stench of war ...

2) ... Grep searches one or more input files for lines containing a match to a specified pattern. By default, grep prints the matching lines ...

3) ... Carmela let her hands move slowly down Randolph's hair-plastered barrel chest, sliding casually but deliberately across his tailored trousers until they hit glorious, contoured, throbbing hardware ...

Or you can read cartoons.

Cartoons are modular. You can read one in about 10 seconds. That's how long it takes, perhaps, to get the gist of it, and stand around enjoying the artistry, or being irritated by its failure, or laughing at its genuine wit. So whether you wait two minutes or a good half-an-hour, they're the perfect timekiller. They stack like the chronological equivalent of tiny legos.

Barnes and Noble has a great selection of New Yorker cartoon books. Besides being well-drawn and occasionally quite funny, picking out a New Yorker cartoon book is like taking a personality test for odious Yuppies: There's the book of golf cartoons. The book of technology cartoons. The book of business cartoons. And the book of political cartoons. What kind of odious Yuppie are you?

For sake of argument, let's say you're an odious political Yuppie.

Appreciating one cartoon about political flunkies particularly — and regretting that it can't be reproduced on the Web for copyright reasons — you hold the page with your thumb while you flip through the rest of the book. It is only after you're done reading about 60 other cartoons that you then realize you've left a big, fat, distinctive chocolate truffle thumbprint on the cartoon.

Well, crap.

Obviously you can't just buy the book. It's $21. And you've just read more than 75 percent of the cartoons. And it's for odious Yuppies.

You are careful to forget, of course, that your hands are filthy from having shoveled a $3 mini-truffle into your mouth just moments earlier.

And so your friend appears, and you leave the store.

It's obviously not the same as shoplifting. It's not like moving the "$1 off Manager's Special" sticker off a cut of chicken that's clearly on sale to a different cut of chicken that is clearly not on sale. Those actions are theft. You didn't steal this book.

It is arguable, however, that you damaged the book. But you damaged one cartoon, which is equal to 10 seconds of pleasure. Even if you're earning, say, $40 an hour — which is a gross exaggeration — 10 seconds has a market value of 11.1 cents. The book is $21. That's a grossly disproportionate overpayment.

So you don't buy the damaged copy, or even another copy. You just let it slide. But you can't sleep well for the rest of the week.

And then, several nights later, it hits you: You didn't just leave a chocolate thumbprint on a book in a bookstore. You left a chocolate thumbprint on your own conscience.

Fortunately, once you've figured that out, you can basically move on and forget about it.

— James Norton (jrnorton@flakmag.com)