When a lovely flame dies.

A YEAR or so ago, perhaps fortified by a lunch of smoked salmon, pan-blackened redfish with mesquite-charred jalapetio coulis, and crepes Suzette flambees, the City Council of Cambridge, Massachusetts, assembled in its smoke-free chamber and passed an ordinance that banned smoking in libraries, including the hundred-odd libraries of the Harvard-MIT archipelago. The Council also ruled that any other place of public accommodation need only provide an area for non-smokers. Result: pipe-smoking Ivy League professors can still commune with Gauloise-puffing French academics on one side of a tiny basement coffeehouse with a ceiling low enough to decapitate John Kenneth Galbraith. But should they attempt to light up in the Widener Library's main reading room, a space vast enough to park a blimp in, off to the gulag with them ! The cancer risk from burning things is universal: be it autumn leaves or gasoline, charbroiled burgers or incense, the thermal decomposition of organic compounds makes some nasty substances. Consider the effluvia of all the fireplaces and furnaces around Harvard Yard, and the even greater amount of exhaust from the vehicles that constantly circle it. It is staggering in its magnitude: tons are burned for every ounce of tobacco consumed in the neighborhood. It's hard therefore to understand why the de minimis effects of passive smoking can arouse such passion.

Since the passive ingestion of smoke can be reduced drastically by taking a few steps away or upwind, in most circumstances those who are riskaverse can be expected simply to move out of smoke's way.

So perhaps the smoker's best revenge is to impose on his persecutors some hard data that will command in them a certain consistency of quantitative paranoia. Last year Science published a complete list of the upper spectrum of toxic health risks, ranging from pesto and root beer, via peanut butter and Szechuan pickles, to the unspeakable horrors of coal-fired electricity. Combined perhaps with the mysteries of the passive Cajun-cooking syndrome (can you believe what they do to that redfish!), this catalogue of horrors establishes that nobody will be spared.

It would seem incumbent on the City Council's neo-Puritan majority to heed one obvious threat: sooty carbon black, a known occupational hazard of the chimney sweep's trade, is a truly baleful carcinogen, laced with combustion products of the darkest hue. So what's the use of a smoke-free library if the innocent are exposed to millions of volumes reeking of printer's ink, which is full of the stuff? Clearly, books are a non-zero risk. They've simply got to go. Cambridge will have to go the whole hog and ban libraries altogether.